


strange, even by alien standards

by suitablyskippy



Category: Tsuritama
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, sweet strange slow-burn alien romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 17:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So is this – are you just visiting, or…?”</p><p>“I’m gonna go home again,” says Haru. </p><p>“Oh,” says Yuki, “okay. That’s, I guess, that’s right. Right.”</p><p>“One day! But not yet. Not for <i>ages</i>, probably!” The last of the tuna sandwich disappears. A moment later, Haru burps: and then he twists right round in his seat and yells, in delight, straight into Yuki’s face. “I forgot that! I forgot about burps! Yuki, do a burp!”</p><p>(Haru leaves, and Haru comes back; and nothing ever gets any less strange, but Yuki feels like that's probably okay.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dawn’s crept up across the skies in a pale smeary pink and the shops are closed, and the roads are empty, and where a breeze ruffles the surface of the sea it throws up little bright reflections of strange, twinkling morning light. There’s a distant tick of bicycle gears. The first soft coos are rising up from seabirds nesting along the waterfront. Somewhere, out to sea, a far-off ship’s horn sounds. It’s still, and it’s peaceful, and it was only with great effort Yuki had managed to convince Haru his plastic novelty harmonica would not be the perfect soundtrack to the morning. 

“On your marks,” says Natsuki. 

“Get set,” says Yuki. 

“Eno – shima – _bowl_!” hollers Haru, and hurls himself forward to the very edge of the dock as he casts. 

“ _Go_ ,” says Akira, as Haru’s lure lands with a _plop_ far out toward the dark fishy-looking shadows near the rocks. “You couldn’t wait for a _moment_? Really, Haru? _Really_?”

“Now you!” says Haru, who’s already hopping from foot to foot on the dockside, waving his fishing pole wildly up and down. “Go go go, ready steady go!”

Yuki looks round at Natsuki. Natsuki’s looking round at him. 

“Loser’s penalty?” 

Natsuki narrows his eyes behind his prescription sunglasses. “Loser gets thrown off the harbour,” he says, after a moment of thought, and Yuki bursts out laughing, draws back his own pole, casts with a yell and a whir of the line and the distant _plop_ of the lure, and there’s a double _plop plop_ as the other two cast and, even harmonica-free, the morning’s got more than a little less peaceful. 

“Wak waaak wak wak –”

“Tapioca, _please_ , there is a time and a place –”

“Um, but Yuki can’t _swim_!”

“Yuki’d better not lose, then, had he!”

The pink dawn streaks with cloudless blue. The moment Akira gets a bite Tapioca rears up, beating her wings with a noisy _waaak-wak-wak_ , and seconds later there’s a jerk on Yuki’s line too and Haru’s cheering, and Akira’s bellowing encouragement at the sea, and Yuki braces one foot against a weathered yellow dock bollard and lets his fish jackknife furiously at the end of its line. 

“Haru, don’t worry about _me_ –” it’s churning the surface of the water into white froth and spray, jumping as he rattles his reel round and round, scales glimmering silver in the morning sun – “when _you_ haven’t even _got_ a bite yet –”

And Yuki knows full well Haru’s got his spacesuit folded at the bottom of his bed, and a backpack packed with souvenirs, and a bag of boiled sweets Kate long ago assured him would ease the effects of intergalactic acceleration if he sucked them during take-off, but that’s the thing about fishing: it doesn’t leave much space, while it’s happening, for anything that _isn’t_ fishing. Yuki’s first catch is fifty-two centimetres; Akira’s is forty-four; Natsuki’s is forty-nine. They’ve all cast again and it’s almost back to peaceful before Haru’s line gets even its first twitch, and he reels it in without effort, humming tunelessly, a distant dreamy gaze turned out toward the horizon: eighty-six centimetres long and forty-two high, a great shiny slab of a fish with an electric blue body and bright yellow go-faster stripes across its fins, which are frilled with red. It flutters its mouth and asphyxiates on the dockside. 

“What kind of fish _is_ that?” says Yuki, in amazement, as Haru scoops it up with some difficulty and cradles it to him, only staggering a little, shining a smile like a floodlight all around him. 

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Natsuki. “Ayumi might know, if anyone knows.”

“Send him a photo!” says Haru. “And Kate! Yuki, take a photo of me! Mmmmm –”

“Did you perhaps communicate with that fish?” says Akira, but Yuki’s fumbling his cell out the back pocket of his shorts and Haru’s busy posing, flicking a V-sign by one of the fish’s bright striped fins and buzzing, for some reason – it’s been a bee-filled August in the Samuel Cocking flowerbeds – and he goes unheard. “Haru. Did you bring that fish to shore by –”

The shutter sound goes. Yuki saves the photo. “I’ll send it to Ayumi, right?”

“Yeah. Ask him what it is,” says Natsuki. “I know I’ve never even heard of anything like it round here.”

“And Kate!” Haru drops his fish into the icebox with a great _whoof_ of effort and then he spins back round to Akira, and catches him in the dazzling beam of his smile. “It’s a present I got for her!”

Akira frowns. “It would be cheating,” he says, “if you _had_ communicated with it.”

“It’s a nice present I got for her,” Haru says again, determinedly. “Because I’m – um. Um, umm.”

Yuki’s laid his fishing pole down across the concrete and he’s texting, sunglasses pushed back into his hair, squinting the glare off his cell screen: but he looks up at that. “Haru?”

“Ummm,” says Haru, who’s gone very still, standing with his skinny shoulders slumped, Kate’s knit peach cardigan hanging off them. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth. “Umm…” 

“Haru –”

“Um –” and then as fast as it came the blankness goes, and he looks back up with an impression of an expression very nearly as radiantly open as his had been. “It’s okay! No-o-o problem! We’ll have the fish at my party! Yuki, send Kate the photo, quick quick!”

Yuki thinks about pointing out that whatever _it_ is, it’s clearly not okay; and then he thinks about the fact that whatever’s not okay with Haru today is probably the exact same thing that’s not okay with him; and he certainly doesn’t want to talk about it. So he doesn’t mention anything, and the _message sent_ notification blips up, and he slips his phone away and says: “Doesn’t this mean Akira caught the smallest fish?”

Akira’s squatting on the dockside, fishing pole beside him, carefully unknotting a yellow-spotted lure. “Best of three,” he says. He doesn’t even bother looking up, and when Tapioca advances – with a hop, and a painfully raucous quack – he startles violently, fumbles his lure, and loses his balance with a wail that’s cut off with a splash so immense it splatters all the way up the dockside wall. 

Haru breaks out into peals of burbling laughter. There are a few satisfied, honking quacks; there are gurgling threats of pancakes, and sweet-sour sauce and shredded seaweed. 

“Not bad,” says Natsuki. He peers down at Akira, clutching at his soaked-through turban and thrashing for a grip on the slimy stone wall, and he adjusts his prescription sunglasses. “Not bad at all. Nice one, Tapio–”

Haru knocks him off the dock with one good shove. 

“– bed of raw spinach and –” gurgling, “– lightly, just _lightly_ braised –”

“– you under a –” more gurgling, “– heatlamp and turn it _all_ the –” gurgling interrupted by quacking, “– no water _any_ where –”

“Oh, no,” says Yuki, hands raised. “No, no. No.” He tries to hold back his laughter but all that happens is it starts to splutter out around the edges instead, and he steps back, turns to run. “I can’t even swim, remember? Aren’t you meant to be concerned about that?”

“But _I_ can!” says Haru, and Yuki’s not even past the first dock bollard when the wind gets knocked out of him and the dock gets knocked out from under him, and the sky flips over on itself and very suddenly he’s soaking wet and splashing vigorously with a mouthful of salt water and his vision turned red from his hair, plastered down across his eyes and streaming seawater. “ _Up_ up up, come on, Yuki!”

He spits out water – he’s not drowning – Haru’s got him in a chokehold and he’s treading water, holding him up with one arm wrapped tight around his throat, still burbling with laughter. 

“I’m gonna get you back,” says Yuki, thrashing wildly, “I’m gonna – gonna –”

“Ta-a-api _o-o-oca_!” yells Haru, and there’s a honk and another plummeting splash. 

“Waaak wak wak –”

“ _That’s_ right, you just _try_ to flap away, you _try_ –”

“You could push her underwater,” says Natsuki, kicking out for shore with his sun visor barely skewed at all, his sunglasses held firm in place by their elastic strap. “Duck her, maybe.” 

Akira lets out another wail of dismay – “No _puns_!” – before resuming, with a fresh intensity, his attempts to splash Tapioca: who bobs contentedly on the ripples his efforts create. 

“Um,” says Haru, “umm. I like this!”

“Phbbpr _ruh_ ,” says Yuki, kicking frantically, and spits out another mouthful of water. “I liked it too, up till _this_ bit.”

“I like you, too,” says Haru. It’s weirdly tranquil, and it would seem weirdly tranquil even if Yuki wasn’t currently about as far from tranquil as he’s been since saving the world two days ago, out of his depth ten times over in the chilly early-morning ocean; and Haru presses his cheek to Yuki’s hair and announces: “Yuki, I’m happy!”

Through a wet red haze Yuki can see Natsuki’s already at the ladder, steel staples set into the stone wall of the dock, climbing up with his windbreaker heavy and streaming. “How about,” he says, and then a small wave crashes down around him and his ears and nose and mouth are suddenly full once more with salt water, and he splutters. “ _Shore_ – how about we –”

“I like it,” Haru says, again, treading water more effortlessly than anyone Yuki’s ever seen, anyone he’s ever been half-choked by while drowning probably to death. “I’m so happy, Yuki!”

“I’d be happier if I wasn’t drowning,” says Yuki, and Haru ducks himself under the water and laughs a gurgling stream of bubbles. 

Tapioca’s settled down to nap by the time they’ve clambered back to shore and Akira scoops her up, head still tucked below her wing, and cradles her close to his sopping wet sports jacket. “A little peace and quiet would be nice,” he says, primly. “ _If_ such a thing is possible.”

“I doubt it,” says Natsuki, and at the same time Yuki says, “It’s definitely not,” and Haru bounces off ahead of them down the harbour wall, still laughing uncontrollably. 

 

\---

 

It’s been two days since the world didn’t end, and Yuki keeps looking for Haru and finding him with Coco. On the sofa, his head in her lap, fiddling with the trailing pink ends of her hair – sprawled out across her stomach in the garden, beneath the slowly spinning sweep of the lawn sprinklers – at the top of the steps down to the beach, sitting pressed up tight against her side in the dusk – and they’re never talking, not out loud, but the instant either of them notices he’s there the other one seems to know as well. Every time, the atmosphere flips instantly on from peaceful to frenetic, and every time Haru leaps up, grabs him by the arm, breaks into immediate excitable chatter, and every time Coco relaxes back into an exaggerated, eye-rolling show of tolerance: so every time Yuki goes along with it, and he pretends he hasn’t seen – whatever it is – because it’s clear neither of them wants him to. 

And Yuki’s pretty sure that if he was a telepathic fish alien from outer space, living in a new body on the wrong side of the universe, he’d want to stay close to his sibling. He’s even more sure that if he’d recently given his sibling up for permanently mind-controlled at best and belly-up dead in the ocean at worst, then he’d want to seize all the time with them he could. So it’s not like he doesn’t get it, because he _totally_ does. It’s just – well, it’s not much. It’s just that Haru’s not easy to read, when he doesn’t want to be; and since saving the world, he _really_ hasn’t wanted to be. 

 

\---

 

“We’re getting ready at Erika’s,” says Coco, and Yuki has barely enough time to glance round from the cherry-patterned tablecloth he’s laying out and say, “Um –” before she’s winking, and jabbing him in the arm harder than he feels is necessary, and spinning away across the garden toward Haru: who’s halfway up a ladder propped against the first floor balcony and tangled hopelessly in bunting. “Brother! We’re going!”

“I’m doing decorating!” 

“Yuki’ll do it!” says Coco. “Won’t you, Yuki?”

Yuki looks at Coco’s ruthlessly cheery smile, and he looks at the way her fists are cocked on her waist just above the rise of her water-float, and he looks back to the smile and she cocks her head and widens it. “Sure. Sure! No problem. Don’t worry about it, Haru.”

“Perfect,” says Coco, and she gives Haru’s ladder a shake that sets it rattling against the bricks of the house. “Down you come, brother!”

“Do that again! Coco! Do it again!”

“Go tell Urara we’re leaving,” Coco orders. 

“Coco, Coco, make it shake! Coco!”

“You’re taking him too?” says Yuki, but Coco’s rattling the ladder and Haru’s whooping in delight, clutching onto its sides and trailing bunting all the way down to a bright jumbled puddle on the grass, so Yuki straightens the edges of the cloth across the trestle table and trudges back indoors. The morning’s broken with soft blue skies and the sea stretched out, calm and glassy; the sliding doors to the garden are pushed back and the kitchen tiles are warm under his bare feet. 

Misaki’s at the stove, killing time with party preparations while the insurance on Hemmingway gets wrangled through, and Urara’s beside her, awkwardly slouching his shoulders so he doesn’t stand too tall, fiddling with a wooden spoon. The radio on the counter is turned down low. Piano music murmurs out. 

“Yuki! Urara and I are making Enoshima bowls – aren’t we, Urara?” 

Urara mumbles something that’s probably polite agreement. 

“I bet it’ll turn out great,” says Yuki, peeling back the saran wrap from a white ceramic bowl that gusts steam and the smell of spiced tomatoes. “Mm-mm – Urara, you’d better hide this, it’s red and it smells good, I don’t think Haru’s going to hold back if he spots it.”

“I’ll put it in the – um, the refrigerator,” says Urara, with a glance at Misaki, and she flips him a double thumbs up and a wink. He’s vague on dates and Haru’s even worse, but Coco reckons that in human time it was nearly five years he spent in the sea, experimentally working his way up to causing the apocalypse through folk dance – so had he eaten nothing but fish in all that time? Sakura had asked, in immediate concern – and had he eaten it no other way than raw and briny? And did he want a bed in one of the spare rooms, Yuki’d wanted to know, or to sleep out with Coco in the rockpools? Maybe a fishbowl in the house in case of emergencies? And he was far too tall to share clothes with Yuki and Haru, of course, but perhaps, suggested Mari – perhaps Natsuki could be persuaded? – unless Urara would prefer to keep his spacesuit on? – and all of two days later here he is, cooking with Misaki like he never tried to end the world, stirring a casserole pot with his wooden spoon held out as gingerly far from him as possible. 

“Oh – Coco and Haru are off to Erika’s now, by the way. Coco’s pretty convinced you’re going with them.”

“Thank you,” mumbles Urara. Yuki gives him an encouraging smile. After a moment, Urara returns it; and after another moment, there’s a drawn-out shrieking scrape from outside the window and then a crash so loud the flowerpots Kate keeps along the windowsill rattle in their trays. 

By the time Yuki’s skidded out the kitchen and hurled himself back into the garden the ladder’s already been propped back up against the wall, and Coco’s scolding Haru, and Haru’s rubbing his head with both hands and whining miserably. 

“Are you all right?” says Yuki, and Haru snaps at once to excitable attention. 

“Yuki! Yuki, Yuki, I fell down! The ladder fell down!”

“It’s your own fault,” says Coco, all business, hooking her elbow through his. “If you wouldn’t mess about so you’d be fine, big brother. Where’s Urara?”

Urara is sidling out the garden doors with his hair freshly unpinned and unravelling in pastel waves around his shoulders. “There!” shouts Haru, and then, for good measure: “Urara! Did you hear! I fell down!”

“I did,” says Urara, and Haru grabs onto Coco’s arm where it’s linked with his and beams round in jubilation. 

They all crunch together down the gravel to the bottom of the driveway. Coco unhooks a loop on the very edge of her float and unhinges the entire top half, which turns out to be scattered with lures and spare fishing lines, a few wax crayons and a few loose sugar cubes, crumpled train tickets and a handful of fresh whitebait. 

“More useful than your human pockets, isn’t it?” she says, when she catches Yuki staring, and as she drops in a pack of blackcurrant cough sweets surreptitiously removed from the bathroom cabinet Haru hurls himself forward, for a goodbye that sends Yuki staggering from the force of it. “See you later!” he yells in English, right into his ear. 

There’s not even a pause. “Au revoir!” Yuki yells right back. 

“You’ve got so _loud_ , Yuki,” says Haru, impressed, and lets him go. 

 

\---

 

Natsuki arrives with a heavy backpack, the icebox in one hand and a picnic basket in the other, and heaves them onto the kitchen table one after the other with a series of crashing thuds. He unloads several cartons of grapes, and a box of skewered multicoloured dango, and prises back the lid of the icebox on the four fish they caught that morning; and Misaki praises the cleanness of his filleting technique and he snorts, looks shiftily away, assures her it’s nothing at all. 

“It was really sweet,” says Yuki, feeding up the line of bunting Haru left tangled on the ground to Natsuki, who’s at the top of the ladder with a pocketful of nails and a pocket-sized hammer. “Like a blushing bride. Do you get this coy around her at work as well?”

“Drop dead,” says Natsuki, and Yuki bursts out laughing. 

They hang bunting across the front of the house; they hang lanterns round the edges of the gazebo; they carry another trestle table out from the depths of the storage room and set it up beside the fountain, and drape it in cloth, and weight down its corners with stones from the rockery. Akira arrives a little before lunch, in a tastefully open-necked, perfectly crisp white shirt and no jacket, and he holds out a plastic bag full of silver tealights. 

“Perfect,” says Yuki. He spills them across the grass. “We can put them out now and light them later – thanks, Akira.”

“It was nothing,” says Akira. There’s a sunny yellow ribbon knotted in a bow round Tapioca’s neck, and he smoothes it, self-consciously.

“You’ve got some buttons undone,” says Natsuki. 

“Yes,” says Akira. 

Yuki starts scooping the tealights back into their bag so that Akira doesn’t see the struggle he’s having trying to keep a straight face. When Natsuki speaks there’s a grin in his voice. “Missed a few, did you?”

“ _You_ wouldn’t know,” says Akira, haughtily, “but this look is in fashion right now.”

“Oh,” says Natsuki, “ _oh_. Well, then. _Fashion_.”

Akira shifts Tapioca higher in his arms, narrows his eyes at Natsuki. “Fashion,” he says, “is a window opened onto _character_.”

“Very dashing,” agrees Misaki, when the matter is raised with her at lunchtime, the four of them and Tapioca seated round the kitchen table. 

“Thank you,” says Akira, and he serves up salad and cold mackerel from the plate in the middle with a quiet new dignity. 

Yuki washes up and then he dries, too, after a moment of confusion before he realises it’s Haru’s job, and Haru’s not there to do it. He adds it to the mental list he’s been keeping, double the chores, things he’ll have to get used to. It’s not a very long list. He hasn’t really thought about it enough, for it to become a very long list. 

Ayumi arrives, on crutches, a little wheeled cart rattling behind him across the cobbles of the square and then up the gravel of the driveway, stacked with clinking brown bottles of cheap local beer. He drags Yuki into a one-armed hug that feels half-lethal, shakes Natsuki so firmly by the hand that he winces, and turns to give Akira’s open shirt collar a critical stare. 

“It’s fashionable,” says Akira, levelly. There’s a tension building up, it feels like, growing ominously darker in the air between them: and then Ayumi claps his free hand to his side and breaks it. 

“Wouldn’t wear it myself, but what the hell, eh? Not gonna hold that kind of thing against a guy who just saved the world. You want a drink, Yamada?”

“I would,” says Akira, after a moment, and Yuki thinks he might just be startled. 

It’s not long then till Sakura turns up, leading a selection of other little girls in shorts and summer dresses and colourful plastic sunglasses behind her. “They’re Haru’s friends!” she says, when Yuki asks, bewildered, and hurries Natsuki off to inflate the paddling pool she’s brought along with her. 

“Right,” says Yuki, as the selection of little girls swarms down on Tapioca, who fluffs out her wings on the brim of the fountain and quacks in satisfaction. “Right, okay. Would you lot like some fruit punch?”

Tamotsu and Mari shut the café down early and arrive the same time as another horde of children descends, this time in pirate costumes of assorted quality and brandishing water guns; and shortly after that Yuki spots Coco, who must have arrived while he was frantically attempting to keep the newest fringes of the party out the flowerbeds, and with her is Erika, also inexplicably dressed as a pirate, a red felt patch flipped down across one eye, which surely means – 

“ _Whoa_ – watch out –!” but Haru’s already launched himself and Yuki staggers back under the sudden impact of an armful of spacesuited alien, arms pinwheeling wildly for balance that never comes and there’s a yowl of excitement from Haru, and a thud, and a flurry of dirt bursts up around them in the flowerbed. 

“Ow,” says Yuki, with feeling, and stares dizzily up at the bunting stretched out across the wide blue sky above him. 

“Yuki, don’t lie on Kate’s flowers!”

“I’m _not_ lying on them,” says Yuki, but Haru’s already grabbing urgently at his shoulder to peel him up and away from the dirt, so Yuki takes his hand and lets Haru heave him up, with an overdramatic groan of exertion. Part of him wants to point out that if he _had_ been lying on the flowers it’d be completely Haru’s fault for jumping him, anyway: but there’s another part of him ruthlessly ticking down the minutes till the time Coco’s scheduled for their takeoff and that bit’s winning out right now. They’ve had three whole months to bicker; he can hold off for their last three hours. 

“Nice spacesuit,” he says, instead. 

Haru taps the underside of his pastel blue sleeve, and the bubble of his helmet retracts into his collar, and he beams. 

“That’s amazing,” says Yuki, and really means it. 

 

\---

 

There isn’t a point when everyone’s arrived because people just _keep on_ arriving, all afternoon. Erika’s grandfather, down from the shrine in a shirt more blindingly floral than any Yuki’s seen on him before – the elderly members of the local Go club – several employees from Enoshima Aquarium, straight from work, still in black work clothes embroidered with the little golden fish of their logo – a bunch of camera-wielding tourists who don’t seem to speak much Japanese but nevertheless join in enthusiastically with the Enoshima dance when a young pirate brandishes her purple water gun and kicks it off. People spill off from the lawn onto the path, into the kitchen, into the gazebo; there’s water splashing from Tapioca in the fountain, and Sakura and Coco in the paddling pool, and Haru with the garden hose, till Yuki intervenes. Tealights flicker warm coloured light out through the paper lanterns. 

_Haino haino haino –_

“Are you all right?” says Yuki. 

“I’m going home!” says Haru, which is not an answer to the question, and Yuki tells him so. Haru waggles his feet from side to side, stretched out on the grass in front of him, and laughs. 

“You’ve been acting strange,” says Yuki. A little way off, beside the buffet table, Mari is deep in conversation with a yellow-suited DUCK agent, whose rabbit-ear antennae bob with every serious nod they give. “I mean, stranger than normal. Is it – do you not like space travel, or…?”

“Mm,” says Haru, “not that. Our spaceship’s full of water!”

“Full of – do you fly it as _fish_?” says Yuki, and Haru makes a noise that’s either agreement or just an experiment with human vocal cords, and before he can help it Yuki imagines – fish piloting a _spaceship_ , fish pressing buttons, pulling levers, fish floating in water caught up in anti-gravity, fish sucking at straws jammed into the silvery ration packets he’s seen in documentaries on NASA, fish sleeping strapped into their bunks so they don’t drift off at night, fish in miniature pastel-blue spacesuits – “No,” he says, “wait, Haru – Haru, you’ve been acting _strange_.”

“I have?” says Haru, and it’s _still_ strange: dreamy, faraway, like he’s really just not quite _there_. 

“You’re still _doing_ it!” says Yuki. “I know you’re going home, and you’re – I know you’re leaving, but if there’s something wrong, you can tell me, right? You know that?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” says Haru, and he lays his head down on Yuki’s shoulder. He’s sitting squashed up against him, warm all down Yuki’s side in his strange smooth spacesuit. The wall of the house is stony behind them. “Thank you, Yuki.”

“I don’t know why you’re thanking me,” says Yuki, but they’ve got two hours left, and he doesn’t press it. Pale hair spills inside the collar of his T-shirt, silky and ticklish. 

_– yoisho yoishona –_

“He’s _always_ acting strange,” Coco says, belligerently, and Yuki startles round from adjusting the knot of a lantern string on a low-hanging tree branch. “Haven’t you met him?”

“I know _that_ ,” says Yuki, “but –”

“Coco!” says Haru, and he grabs her round the middle of her spacesuit in a hug that lifts her to her tiptoes. Urara skulks a little way behind, his hands wound tight together before him. 

“My big brother’s strange even by _our_ planet’s standards,” says Coco, who is wearing a piratical eyepatch to match Erika’s, red felt on black elastic, pulled down across the glass of her helmet, inches away from her spectacles within. 

“Coco,” says Haru, again, fondly, lilting. “Have you had some of my fish yet? My fish I caught? My huuuuge fish I caught?”

“You’re always catching fish,” says Coco. 

“This one’s _special_ ,” says Haru – and it is, they find out, laid out in still-warm slices across the biggest china serving dish Yuki knows Kate has, and Yuki serves himself on a paper plate and greets Natsuki, who’s looking wet through and irritated, sipping from a cup of fruit punch. 

“Sakura got me in the paddling pool,” he says, and gazes out into the distance beyond the garden wall as though there is nothing in the world he would like less to discuss the details of. 

_– haino haino haino –_

“Speech!” cries Ayumi. The cry’s taken up: “Speech! Speech!” and plastic cutlery rattles against plates and water guns and the wooden posts of the gazebo. 

“ _Me_?” says Haru, pointing at himself, bewildered. 

“You could tell us what you think about Enoshima,” says Misaki, and touches his shoulder, and smiles. “Or you could tell us what your home is like. Tell us what you want, Haru! Think of it as a special kind of goodbye, to everyone at once.”

Haru presses both hands to his mouth, lost in serious thought; and then he brightens and clambers onto the brim of the fountain, and spreads out his arms, and looks out at the happy, clamouring crowd before him. A hush falls, slowly. “I’m Haru!” he says. “I’m an alien! And I think – Enoshima is my favourite place on _Earth_!”

Laughter, catcalls, _it’s the only place you_ know _on Earth_. Yuki glances round and sees, on every side, shades of the same fond expression. 

“And it’s really good that it’s safe!” Haru’s saying, late afternoon sun turning his hair to dazzling bright white. “And Yuki and Natsuki and Akira saved it really well! And –”

“Speech!” yells Coco, watching with her arms folded, her smile quirked up. “C’mon, Yuki, speech! Natsuki! Yamada! Don’t leave him on his own up there!”

“Wait,” says Yuki. 

“Speech!” says Sakura. 

“Hold on,” says Natsuki. 

“It would be a _pleasure_ ,” says Akira, and as he steps up beside Haru Yuki finds he’s being moved inexorably in the same direction, stumbling on the lip of the fountain, Natsuki just behind him registering extremely vocal objection. 

“I can’t do this,” says Yuki. He looks out at the crowd and the crowd looks back at him. Glasses are raised to him; smiles are turned to him; someone whoops his name and it’s whooped back and back again across the garden. _Sanada – Yuki – Sanada – Yuki –_ “Oh, no. No. No no no. Oh, God.”

A hand links into his, and squeezes. “Not a good face, Yuki.”

Sakura’s smiling up at him – Ayumi’s raised one clenched fist to him – a man Yuki thinks he’s seen behind the fish counter in the supermarket is nodding at him, in approval, sanitary net still pulling back his hair. He takes a deep breath, and squeezes Haru’s hand so tight he wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d complained, and he says: “I’m Yuki. I’m a human. And – I think Enoshima might be _my_ favourite place on Earth, as well.”

There’s a cheer. It takes him by surprise and he looks round at the faces turned up to his, crammed in across the lawn, and then to Natsuki, who bumps their shoulders and grins, and then to Akira, on Natsuki’s other side, cradling Tapioca. Akira nods one sharp nod of approval and Yuki looks to Erika, in the front row, her eyes crinkled warmly up, and to Haru, beside him, waving energetically at his crowd, hand warm in his. 

“We,” says Yuki. He stops, and clears his throat, and starts again. “We, um. Sort of saved the world. A bit. But it wasn’t a big deal, and Urara didn’t mean it like that, anyway. Really we’re just – I think we’re just happy to be here. And I think – um. I think all of us are happy Haru’s here.”

There’s another cheer. It’s louder, and lasts longer, and twice Yuki starts to speak again and gives up, drowned out, watching in wonder as an assortment of middle school students strike up a raucous, energetic rendition of the Enoshima dance right in the centre of the crowd and people clink bottles against cups and glasses and Coco slings her arm around Urara’s shoulders, which necessitates some awkward stooping on his part and tiptoes on hers. 

“We couldn’t have done it without him,” says Yuki. “We – well. We wouldn’t have even _met_ without him. Probably most people here wouldn’t have met, without him.”

The cheer does not abate. He’s starting to get used to it. He raises his voice again, and says: “And Haru wouldn’t be here if his little sister didn’t know how to fly a spaceship, and just. Um. Be a really terrifying intergalactic ambassador. A really good one. So I’m – uh. We – we should.”

Haru’s not waving any more: he’s looking at Yuki. So’s Coco, gone still with her arm wrapped round Urara. Yuki rubs at his mouth with the hand that isn’t getting embarrassingly sweaty in Haru’s. “We should say thank you,” he says. “To Haru, and Coco, and their planet, whatever it is. Seeing as neither of them will actually tell anyone.”

“Hear, hear!” says Natsuki, and there’s a moment of silence across the garden and the warm sweet smell of its flowers: and then it takes off. 

“ _Haru – Coco – whatever your planet is_! _Haru – Coco – whatever your planet is_!”

“Yuki,” says Haru, so softly Yuki thinks he’s imagined it, till Haru pulls on his hand and forces him to step closer or topple back into the fountain. “Yuki, thank you.”

“No,” says Yuki, “we’re thanking _you_ right –”

“Pa-pa- _pow_!” yells Haru, and jumps: and when Yuki breaks the surface moments later, on his knees and up to his shoulders in the fountain’s icy water, teeth chattering, dripping algae, the cheer’s still going. _Haru – Coco – whatever your planet is!_

Haru surfaces with a great goofy smile Yuki’s not seen on him in days and lurches forward at once to seize him by the wrists. “Thank you!” he says, splattering water in every direction with every vigorous nod of his head. “Yuki, Yuki, thank you! I like you! I like you _so_ much!”

“Me too,” says Yuki, “I mean – you. You, I like _you_ , not – you know that, right? That I’ve, um – that I like you?”

“Mm!” says Haru, and pulls him down close enough to bump foreheads, his breath distinctly fishy. “Not as much as I – like – _you_!”

 

\---

 

Ayumi leads the way down to his ship and the party begins to dissipate, till it’s just the last world-saving few of them. Coco detaches Haru from Yuki’s arm and pulls Urara behind her, and the three of them hurry down the beach, silhouettes in spacesuits, footsteps on wet sand tracking out of sight. Sakura hangs off Natsuki’s hand and Erika holds Tapioca, who nuzzles into the dark curtain of hair falling round about her head and quacks contentedly, and when Misaki wraps her arm behind Ayumi’s back to steady him onto the ship Ayumi turns a vibrant, trembling shade of pink. 

“I am willing to sail,” says Akira, after a moment, the deck listing beneath them, “if you are incapable, Captain.”

“No! No! I’m more than capable! I could do _anything_!” Ayumi hesitates, one crutch drumming rapidly on the boards, and then, still pink, he says: “Misaki-san! If you please, would you perchance maybe accompany me to the captain’s booth?”

“You goof,” says Misaki, and she does, and moments later the engine sputters and hums into life. 

The spaceship is a strange upturned pink cup with four yellow bulbs on the base that Yuki takes for engines, or blasters, or rockets, though they’re soundless but for a gentle liquid sloshing he only hears when Coco divebombs the boat, whooping in triumph as Natsuki hurls himself down flat to the deck for safety. It doesn’t look big enough to fit three person-sized aliens: but then, Yuki supposes, they’re probably going to be fish-sized, on the journey. Fish in space. Fish in anti-gravity. Fish in bubble-headed spacesuits. It’s still a weird thought. 

They say goodbye. The spaceship goes from hovering to whipping upward in no seconds flat and then it’s gone, a speck in the blue sky that winks out in moments. Haru’s gone home. That’s still a weird thought, too. 

Kate finally arrives back home in the early evening and finds Yuki trudging round the garden with a bin liner, picking up the crumpled plastic cups and half-squashed paper plates, the stray crusts of bread and occasional dropped cherry tomato, Coco’s cast-off piratical eyepatch and a few listing flags of bunting fallen from their line. 

“How was it?” 

“Grandma,” says Yuki, and finds quite suddenly that he’s got no idea where he wants to go from there. 

She opens her arms for a hug and he takes it, turns his face into her shoulder and smells the smells of stuffy public transport. “I didn’t want him to go,” he mumbles, and Kate smoothes his hair, slow and reassuring. “I told him I wouldn’t let him go, I said – I told him he could stay here forever, I _told_ him…”

“Enjoy what you have, while you have it. That’s the only thing to do. And you did that, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t want him to go,” he says again, and her hand stills on the back of his neck, stays there, comforting. Haru’s planet wanted him back, so Haru’s planet has taken him back: and it has taken him back tonight, or whatever ‘tonight’ counts for on a planet Yuki imagines vaguely to be mostly vast clear oceans, populated exclusively by the brightest and frilliest of telepathic tropical fish. 

Beyond the fence the kids from the party are laughing, skidding round the flowerbeds in the Samuel Cocking Gardens next door. _Got you, got you! – base, it’s you_ –

He takes a breath and pulls away. 

“All right?” says Kate. 

“I think so,” says Yuki. It’s true, strictly speaking. 

“You just let me know if you need any help out here, Yuki, okay?”

“Thanks,” he says. “I mean – thanks. For all of it. Thank you.”

“Things work out,” Kate says, and she rubs the small of his back before turning away, back up the gravel path to the house. 

 

\---

 

The next morning he pads down to the bathroom in the T-shirt and shorts he slept in, blearily rubbing sleep from his eyes with one hand and rapping at Haru’s door with the other as he passes. It’s not till he’s sitting on the edge of the bath, rubbing his hair in a towel as the water from his shower goes gurgling down the drain, that he notices: there’s still no commotion outside. No one bouncing on the floorboards, or whooping their way down the banister or hammering on the bathroom door chanting his name over and over and over on a different pitch every time. 

Yuki lowers the towel for a moment, and looks at the three yellow rubber ducks lined up between the bathtaps. There’s a plastic fish lying on its side on the end of the line of rubber ducks – orange with silver speckles, a gift from Misaki to Haru, and it blows bubbles if it’s squeezed while underwater – and a little carved wooden sailboat and, for some reason, a round yellow plastic picnic plate from the kitchen, propped innocuously up against the tiles. 

Outside the bathroom window, pushed back to let out the steam from the shower, the day looks like it’s breaking bright and fresh across the garden. Kate is whistling to herself in the kitchen downstairs. Yuki curls his toes in the bathmat, and he pulls the towel back up, and he carries on where he left off.


	2. Chapter 2

“I’m sure many of you’ve spotted Haru on the news these last few weeks. Or on the wanted posters, or maybe just on the rampage in Enoshima – and I doubt it comes as a surprise to anyone to hear he won’t be joining us again this year.” Their teacher taps his pen against the class register laid out on his desk for a moment and then he looks up, and smiles round. “So let’s all take a minute for ourselves, to thank Haru for saving our town, and to wish him luck back on his home planet. He wasn’t here long, but I think we can all agree that school life won’t be the same without him. Quieter, more organised, better disciplined – but certainly not the same.”

Laughter ripples out from him around the classroom. The desk in front of Yuki has its chair tucked neatly in. 

“We’ve also said goodbye to Yamada, who’s left us in favour of pursuits more suited to a twenty-five year old.”

“Sir, excuse me –”

“We’ve said goodbye to Yamada _and_ his duck,” says their teacher, and the laughter ripples out again. “And now – if someone can pass round the test papers, it’s time to find out just how much you’ve all forgotten this summer.”

The blinds clatter quietly in the breeze from open windows and Yuki clicks the end of his pen and rests his cheek against his hand, and doodles a selection of fish blowing bubbles up round the corners of his test paper. 

“It’s weird to me that it even _feels_ weird without them,” says Natsuki, in the mid-morning break. “It’s understandable for you, because you never knew this class before Haru came. But me, I’ve lived in Enoshima all my life.” He’s sitting on Yuki’s desk, chewing at a knotted twist of whitebait jerky, blazer slung across his lap. Back in pale blue uniform they’re both more tanned than Yuki’d realised, sun-brown and leaner all over. “All these guys – they were in my class even back in middle school. I’m _used_ to not having Haru making a racket in every lesson.”

“Or people passing notes to Tapioca the whole time. Or Akira reading them out to her,” says Yuki, “or getting mad if he thinks they’re inappropriate, or asking her the answers in maths, or –”

“– or seeing you making gross faces every time I try to look out the window. Which – _which_!” he says again, louder, when Yuki shoves his chair back onto its two rear legs and glowers indignantly up at him, “you’ve stopped doing as much now, anyway. Now that you actually talk to people.”

“Now that _you’ve_ stopped threatening to _kill_ us,” says Yuki, as the _br-r-ring_ of the bell for start of class sounds out down the halls, and Natsuki actually grins. 

Erika pulls her desk up to Yuki’s at lunch and brings her friends with her, and Natsuki takes the empty chair from Haru’s desk and joins them just in time to save Yuki from the paroxysm of speechless hot-faced panic he feels himself sliding helplessly into the moment Yumi asks him, reverently, just how it felt to save the world. 

“Wasn’t anything, really,” says Natsuki. 

“She wasn’t asking _you_ ,” says Erika. 

“Are those whitebait mochi?” says Emi, staring in horrified fascination into Natsuki’s lunchbox, its plastic lid peeled back on a tight-packed range of whitebait products, and Yuki breathes in, out, in, out, clutching surreptitiously onto the edge of his desk – “It’s not like he did it alone, _is_ it?” – and he listens to them bicker – “Maybe Yuki’s just nicer to talk to, did you think of _that_?” – and he feels the panic subside, faster and easier than he’d used to think could ever be possible. 

 

\---

 

They’re at the train station later, schoolbags between their feet, sitting in peaceful silence with their backs to the timetables, when Natsuki, from nowhere, lets out a quietly anguished groan. 

Yuki glances round in some alarm. “Are you all right?” 

“ _No_ ,” says Natsuki, and he drops his head into his hands. “It’s too quiet. I can’t relax. Every single minute that passes I just spend expecting Haru to come leaping out of hiding and yell something ridiculous in my face.” Yuki’s already laughing. “I’m _tense_ ,” says Natsuki. He’s glaring at the ground like he holds it personally responsible. “This is stressing me out.”

“You’re telling _me_ ,” says Yuki, “I mean – imagine suddenly being able to use the bathroom in peace for the first time in months. My whole _life’s_ been changed.”

“I keep,” says Natsuki, darkly, “finding myself –” darker still, “– making _stupid noises_. In my head. Every time I cast. _Every_ time I cast. Every single time.”

“See,” says Yuki, and for Natsuki’s sake he bites back the laughter that’s trying to bubble right up again, “we _all_ changed! _Everything_ changed. You just miss him more than you thought you would.”

“I knew I’d miss him, though,” Natsuki says. He sits back up, adjusts his glasses. “I guess I just didn’t realise things’d be so different. I’d miss him, sure, sure – but life would be the way it always was. You know what I mean?” 

The tracks have started to rattle. Around them people are gathering up bags, getting up from seats, moving toward the edge of the platform. “I know what you mean,” says Yuki, after a moment, and he scoops up his satchel and slings it back across his shoulder and follows Natsuki as the train rumbles in. He feels a bit less like laughing, when it’s put like that. 

 

\---

 

The end of summer was already closing in by the time Haru left and autumn only picks up pace from there. The daylight doesn’t last so long and the flowers in the garden don’t bloom so brightly, and when Yuki kicks off his shoes on the shore and wades out, Sakura at his side with an armful of Tapioca and a plastic green kids’ fishing net, the water is nowhere near as warm as it was just weeks ago. 

“Do you think she’d like a swim?” says Sakura. Tapioca turns her gaze out toward the darkening navy horizon and quacks, once, significantly. “Yuki, do you think that means she’d like a swim? I think it does.” She stoops to lower her into the water. Tapioca _wak-wak-wak_ s in appreciation, ruffles her wings out and ruffles them back in and starts waggling away from the two of them through the water, head held haughtily high. 

Sakura wades on in. They’re both barefoot and the sand’s turned to stones, slimy underfoot, seaweedy and slippery and given to wedging between toes and jabbing up into the soft arches of their soles; but the water’s clear, and saltwater minnows dart around them casting tiny rapid shadows on the stones. “Yuki, come on!”

Akira’s hollering in outrage from the shore. Tapioca’s feathery behind waggles on, undaunted. Sakura tucks her fishing net beneath her arm and knots up the hem of her dress, and when she yells, “ _Yuki_!” and brandishes the net back toward him, he hastily splashes in deeper. 

An hour later Sakura’s caught one minnow and one dark bladdery tangle of seaweed, and she upends her net as they’re wading back to shore. Natsuki pats her comfortingly on the head; she stamps her foot and orders him not to condescend to her; Yuki slips on his flip-flops and listens, grinning down at the sand, to Natsuki’s panicked apologies. 

Akira scoops up Tapioca from the shallows. 

“If you’ll excuse us,” he says, and pulls out from his jacket pocket a red baseball cap with a bright spinning pinwheel affixed to the peak, “we have a mission to resume. You may see us again soon, although I can make no guarantees. Tapioca – your disguise.”

“Wak,” says Tapioca, and dips her beak into the front pocket of his shirt. There’s a miniature red cap in there, a miniature pinwheel spinning. Carefully, one-handed, he knots its ribbon beneath her chin. “Wak _wak_.”

“Because red suits me,” says Akira. 

“Wak,” says Tapioca. 

“It _does_ suit me,” says Akira. 

“Wak-wak-waaak,” says Tapioca.

“You know _full well_ that brocade was out of my price range,” says Akira, and he nods one brief nod of dignified farewell before turning away, back up the beach toward the road, Tapioca still disagreeing noisily in his arms. 

Later that evening – fine mesh net pulled down across the open window in the Usamis’ kitchen to keep the gnats out, peppery steam curling up from the pot on the stove, Yuki and Sakura playing snap at the scrubbed-clean table – when Natsuki’s dad comes up from the café with Mariko to the table already laid and Natsuki already impatiently serving – barely a moment after Yuki’s taken his first spoonful from his bowl of curry – later that evening, Natsuki says: “I’m leaving Enoshima,” and the spice kicks in the same time the news kicks in and Yuki coughs, splutters, turns from the table and wipes his eyes in his sleeve till they’re done watering and he’s done choking. 

“Is that so?” says Tamotsu. 

“Yeah. There’s this tournament,” says Natsuki, not looking up from his bowl, “in January. In Florida. I’m gonna start out there.”

“Florida?” says Yuki. “In _America_?”

“I’m the fishing prince,” says Natsuki. He’s jabbing his spoon into his bowl like he’s got no greater care in the world right now than loading it up with the maximum carrots. “I want to be the fishing king.”

After a moment, Tamotsu pushes back his chair and stands, and reaches out across the table to clap his hand down on Natsuki’s shoulder. “Bet you’re gonna make one hell of a splash out there,” he says. “Wish I’d had the guts to do something like that when _I_ was your age, I can tell you!”

Natsuki looks up, suspiciously. Sakura’s chewing at the end of her spoon, wide-eyed. 

“One hell of a _splash_ ,” says Tamotsu, again. “Get it? Splash? In the water? Eh, Natsuki, get it? Eh?”

“Oh my God,” says Natsuki, and resumes jabbing at his curry with an irritation that isn’t even _well_ -feigned. There’s most of a poorly held-back smile there, perfectly clear to see; and when Tamotsu sits back down and announces the meal to have now become an official celebration, and therefore worthy of a scoop of whitebait ice cream each to end the day, Natsuki laughs in relief. 

The whitebait ice cream is horrendous but Yuki empties his bowl and accepts seconds, when they’re offered. The room’s too warm and happy not to. 

 

\---

 

Natsuki’s leaving party happens on the beach, as the sun sets on the crackling light of the campfire Yuki helped him build that afternoon, combing the sand for driftwood dried out by low tide and rocks big enough to pile the tinder up on. Natsuki strikes a match, flicks it ceremonially into the heart of the not-yet-bonfire, strikes another and another and glares down at the cold still wood. 

“C’mon, pass it over,” says Tamotsu, slapping him between the shoulderblades, “let’s have a go.”

The flames light and catch first try. As the sky gets darker they leap brighter, higher, warmer in the cool evening, and eventually Yuki wades up with Natsuki from the shoreline and they drop down on the sand, wet bare feet outstretched toward it. “How long now?” says Yuki. 

Natsuki angles his watch to the light of the fire. “Fourteen hours.”

“Fourteen hours – wow. Do you think you’re gonna be able to sleep?”

“I’m not a little kid,” says Natsuki, his tone withering. “It’s not my birthday. It’s not a holiday.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” says Yuki. “I think that means yes.”

After a moment Natsuki drops back his head and laughs, loud enough that Erika glances up in surprise from across the fire, her little sister sprawled out on the sand and half-asleep in her lap. “You got me,” he says. “I’m nervous as anything, if you want to know. I’m going to sleep about as well as Sakura the night before she started middle school.”

“Knew it,” says Yuki. The fire spits, hisses; he curls his fingers in the sand and it’s damp. “You’re okay, though? I mean – you’re gonna be okay? With it? America?”

“Probably,” says Natsuki, and then he catches sight of Yuki’s expression turning panicked and he bumps their shoulders, gently. “I’m gonna be _fine_ , Yuki. You really think I’d be doing this if I thought there was any chance I’d never be the best at everything over there?”

“Good point,” says Yuki. “Yeah. Good point. Okay. Fourteen hours, _wow_.”

“I know,” says Natsuki, and it’s not quite glum but it’s not exactly eager, not like Yuki’s been thinking it might be. The sky stretches out, streaked in peachy orange. “Yuki.”

“Yeah?”

“Are _you_ gonna be okay?”

“What?”

“Haru – and me, and Akira, and –” He breaks off, scrubbing one hand awkwardly up the bristly side of his latest haircut. “It’s fine. I’m being stupid. Too much time with you. Forget it, you’re fine.”

“It feels weird,” says Yuki, “if that’s what you mean. But, um. It’s. If I put it like this you’re gonna think I’m – well, it’s like this. When I go outside and the – um, the garden’s there. And it’s blooming. And the sea’s there and the beach is there, and it’s sunny, or not sunny, or. Whatever. It’s like – oh, God, no no, I can’t say this…”

“What’s it like?” says Natsuki, and Yuki pulls in his knees and wraps his arms tight round them, and takes a breath. 

“Like every time I see the world I remember how we saved it,” he says, in a rush. “So even if you’re in America – or outer space – or classified top secret locations with Caribbean postmarks – it’s like you guys are here. Because the world’s here. And we kept the world here. This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said out loud.”

“Oh, _that’s_ not true,” says Natsuki. “Remember when you and me and Haru went to that pizza place? The one on the mainland? And the server asked what you wanted? And you panicked so hard you just yelled your name at her? And ran? And we had to leave and come get you from the bus shelter down the street?”

“Oh my God,” says Yuki, to his knees, and Natsuki laughs. 

 

\---

 

He wakes up in the morning with thin pale slats of light falling across him through his blinds, and rolls over with a groan, and peels one eye open to check the clock on his nightstand: which says seven fifteen. Natsuki’s takeoff was scheduled ten minutes ago. 

Yuki pushes up one corner of the blinds and squints out, into the misty morning daylight. The sky is white and unclear. A single thinning contrail cloud arcs across behind the observation tower, but the chances it’s from Natsuki’s plane are low, so low it’s ridiculous. 

He flops back again. He must have slept through his alarm. It’s time to go fishing. 

He’s never been fishing alone, before. 

 

\---

 

Akira’s sporadic visits cease entirely, but he sends postcards, with enigmatic messages designed to baffle all attempts at alien codebreaking, signed with a footprint from Tapioca in ink. Yuki doesn’t often understand the content of the heavily-ciphered postcards, but he pins them up above his desk anyway, and looks thoughtfully at the pictures when his homework has him stumped. Narrow cobbled streets, sloping terracotta roofs, cyclists on bikes with no gears – goats herded together on dusty red tracks, chickenwire fencing keeping them back – arching palm trees, crystal waters, colourless sand. The colour of Tapioca’s signature changes every few weeks, and Yuki supposes Akira buys her new inkpads, when the old ones run out, or maybe just whenever she demands it. 

Natsuki calls him on his laptop at least once a week, and Yuki calls him, too. Video chat across the Pacific lags and crackles, and sometimes Natsuki freezes in place and Yuki takes as many screencaps as he can while he’s stuck, glitching on one weird mid-speech expression, and sends them to him, laughing, as soon as the video catches back up with the audio. On slow afternoons at Hemmingway he props his laptop against the lure trays and talks while he goes about his work, wipes down rental poles, rearranges the displays, unspools and respools twists of fishing line around their reels; and sometimes Misaki comes to chat, when she thinks Ayumi doesn’t know, and sometimes Ayumi comes, when he thinks Misaki doesn’t know, and they all look out in wonder at the streetlights twinkling in the dark American night, at the narrow window behind Natsuki’s desk. 

Haru doesn’t get in touch, but Haru lives in another solar system, or another galaxy, or another universe or maybe a whole other reality. There are still photos on his phone, though, and the sight of Haru enthusiastically clutching some improbably large and gaudy fish to his chest reassures Yuki, every time he starts to feel uncertain, that the summer really happened. He thinks about emailing NASA – _so how far into space, exactly, can you broadcast messages?_ – but he’s not sure they’d listen – _and would you broadcast for me?_ – so he doesn’t, and when loneliness creeps up on him while washing dishes, setting the garden sprinklers, alone on the harbour wall fighting to reel in something heavy and silver, he pushes it off with thoughts of the postcards on his wall, the screencaps in his image folder. 

It’s good. It’s not wonderful, not like it was, but he goes to school and he comes home and he goes to work and he fishes, and he accepts Erika’s invitations to her house and offers her his own, and clenches his fists tight in his blazer pockets to strike up conversation with other classmates, pulling out starter questions he’s rehearsed frantically in front of his mirror before daring to bring them out in public, smiling a terribly panicked smile. But Yuki saved the world, and everyone’s keen to talk. 

It’s not wonderful: but it’s good, and he’s happy. 

And Haru comes back. 

“I’m happy on Earth!” he says, at lunch, his chair pulled in so close beside Yuki’s they may as well be sharing, and not remotely surreptitiously he steals Yuki’s tuna sandwich. 

“I’m – happy you’re on Earth,” says Yuki, in bewilderment, and continues to stare, as though any moment now this hyperactive vision is going to become abruptly less solid, abruptly less invasively squashed in against his side, abruptly less noisy in its tuna sandwich consumption. “So is this – are you just visiting, or…?”

“I’m gonna go home again,” says Haru. 

“Oh,” says Yuki, “okay. That’s, I guess, that’s right. Right.”

“One day! But not yet. Not for _ages_ , probably!” The last of the tuna sandwich disappears. A moment later, Haru burps: and then he twists right round in his seat and yells, in delight, straight into Yuki’s face. “I forgot that! I forgot about burps! Yuki, do a burp!”

“You – forgot about burps?”

“Mm! And bellybuttons! And how to do hopping! Humans can do so many _things_ , Yuki!”

“We,” says Yuki, dazed. “I guess we, yeah. We can.” Haru has grabbed his hand and is holding it up to the light of the window, waggling each of Yuki’s fingers back and forth, one by one, with a frown of intense concentration. He’s cold, and a bit damp, and he smells faintly of stagnant rockpools and he isn’t being particularly gentle, but Yuki – sinking into increasingly delighted bemusement – lets him. “Do you – have you got somewhere to stay, or do you – um, we’ve still got our spare room, if you’d –”

“And Urara!” 

Urara is sitting one desk over with his hands folded in his lap, daring the occasional glance up from the exercise book laid out before him. His tie is extremely neatly tied. 

“And Urara,” says Yuki. “You can both stay, I mean – of course you can. And Coco, if she wants, we’ve got the space, plenty of it –”

“Coco’s gone back home,” says Haru, wholly preoccupied with an attempt to lever Yuki’s fingernails from his fingers. “She’s got e-e-e _xams_.”

“Haru, _ow_ , those are attached to me, use your own – _exams_?”

“Coco is in training,” says Urara, and his voice is ever so soft, “to qualify as a pilot.” 

“A _space_ pilot!” corrects Haru, proudly. 

“A qualified space pilot –” but why _not_ a qualified space pilot? – Haru’s back, after all, and nothing could possibly be stranger than _that_ , “– I _missed_ you,” says Yuki, and he pulls his hand from Haru’s clammy grip before he actually succeeds in prising loose any fingernails and says it again, in a kind of wonder, mildly stunned: “I _missed_ you.”

 

\---

 

“ _I_ missed you!”

“Well, I missed you, too,” says Kate, and then, “ _oof_ – be gentle, Haru!” He leaps back at once, aghast, his arms flung up as far from hugging as they can possibly get. “I’m not as sturdy as Yuki is, you know.”

“ _No_ one’s as sturdy as Haru thinks they are,” says Yuki. He’s got Haru’s backpack over one shoulder and the handle of a flat yellow disc over the other, which Haru’s assured him will spring back up into the strange basin bed he kept in their spare room through all of summer, just as soon as it’s unfolded. He’s not entirely sure why he offered to carry them but he suspects, perhaps, that he’s still so dazed by this whole new reality that he’d do just about anything, if it was Haru asking – water gun entirely unnecessary. 

Haru’s pressing his hands all over the wallpaper in the entrance hall and cooing to himself, appreciatively. Yuki drops his bags. 

“And who’s this young gentleman?” says Kate. 

“I am Urara,” says Urara, from a bow so deep it puts his voice somewhere around his knees. “I once tried to take over your planet. I apologise for that.”

“All’s well that ends well,” says Kate, “wouldn’t you say? Do you like red miso, by any chance, Urara?”

After a moment, Urara raises himself, and looks uncertainly to Haru. 

“Urara doesn’t know about Earth food yet,” says Haru, importantly. “So, um – you should probably make it, Kate, to teach Urara, so he knows about it as much as _I_ do, about, um, Earth food, and red miso –”

“Why don’t you just say _you_ want it?” says Yuki, and Haru whirls round from his examination of the wallpaper, utterly scandalised. “Come on, you’re being _totally_ obvious –”

“I’m being _polite_! I’ve got really good Earth manners!”

“Oh, yeah, right, and you don’t actually want red miso for yourself, then? You’re just looking out for Urara?”

“Shall we leave them to it?” says Kate, and Urara stops winding his ponytail anxiously round and round and round his fingers and looks at her, in mild alarm. “Come on through to the kitchen, let’s fix up some supper. And you can tell me all about your day at school. How about it?”

“I would –” and then Haru claps his hands over his ears and starts singing noisy nonsense to a tune that Yuki feels quite sure no planet in the galaxy could ever appreciate, and Urara raises his voice a little and tries again. “I would – like that. My thanks to you.”

“Pa- _ba_ loo-la-la, ba-papa _paaa_ –”

“‘I want red miso’ – just say it, c’mon, it’s not difficult, just _say_ it –”

“This way, then,” says Kate, and there’s already a pan bubbling noisily on the stovetop by the time the noise from the entrance hall starts to travel closer: and Haru skids in with Yuki dragged behind him by the sleeve. 

“We’re going fishing!” he announces, at top volume. 

“There isn’t _time_ ,” says Yuki, who’s having difficulty being annoyed when the only thing he feels like doing is yelling out his happiness from the balcony for the whole of Enoshima to hear. “I told you that two seconds ago, I’ve got _work_ –”

“We’re going quick fishing!” Haru announces, exactly as loudly. 

“Have fun, boys,” says Kate, and Yuki looks from her to Urara, who slides his gaze hurriedly sideways as soon as he realises he’s being looked at, and from Urara to Haru, who’s busily pushing up the cuff of Yuki’s school blazer to fiddle with the velcro strap of his watch, and he finds no sympathy anywhere. 

“If I’m fired,” Yuki starts, ominously, “if I’m _fired_ –” but cold fingers prodding inquisitively about on the inside of his wrist have flipped his stomach over in the kind of giddy anti-gravity way he associates with aeroplane take-off, and the threat tails away. He’s smiling. He’s not completely sure he’s ever going to be able to stop smiling. 

“Quick fishing?” says Haru. 

“All right,” says Yuki. 

 

\---

 

“I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“Are you covering the camera?”

“Are you ready?”

“Sure,” says Natsuki, peering out the screen in vague bewilderment, and Yuki uncovers his webcam. 

Haru bounds straight up from his chair in excitement and Yuki grabs the back of his shirt to pull him right back down. “Natsuki! Can you see me? It’s me! Haru!”

“I can hear you right across the Pacific,” says Natsuki, but he’s grinning. “Tone it down, you’re making my speakers crackle.”

“Surpri-i-ise,” says Haru, happily, and pats the portion of the laptop screen containing Natsuki’s cheek. 

“It’s definitely that,” Natsuki says. After a moment, he reaches up from his keyboard and his camera darkens, and there’s a soft _tap_ , through the speakers, as he returns the pat. “Welcome back, Haru. I knew Yuki’d drag you back to Enoshima sooner or later.”

“I had nothing to do with it!” says Yuki, indignantly. His face is already hot and it only gets hotter when Haru flings an arm around his shoulders and tugs him down, to his level, cheek to beaming pink cheek. 

“Not _true_ , Yuki!”

“Eh? Wait – hang on, I _didn’t_ , you just showed up out of nowhere –”

Natsuki’s still grinning, arms folded on his desk. There’s an electric blue fishing pole propped against the wall behind him, a squat silver trophy on an otherwise optimistically empty shelf, a half-wound reel abandoned on the desk beside him, its line spooling loopily out. Outside his window, streetlights are beginning to flicker on. “You ought to listen to Haru, Yuki,” he says, and Haru bursts out laughing. 

“Yeah, Yuki, _listen_ to me!”

“I _do_ listen to you!”

“Listen, listen, listen, listen –” and he’s off, bouncing in his seat and chanting a chant that deteriorates into cheerful nonsense burbling within moments. 

“Don’t worry about it,” says Natsuki, raising his voice over Haru’s noise and Yuki’s harried apologies. “Go catch a tuna for me, okay? At least a metre or it doesn’t count. Photographic evidence, too.”

 

\---

 

It’s days before Haru even gets close to simmering down, and even then it’s the kind of simmer that’d get Yuki panicking if he saw it in the kitchen: noisy, and near to exploding, and more than likely still manically bubbling beneath the saucepan’s precariously balanced lid. He whirls from the harbour to the caves to the cliffs to the town centre like a small blond hurricane, looking for lobsters and Sakura then lobsters _with_ Sakura and bursting into every shop on the high street to reintroduce himself enthusiastically to every single staff member and every single customer in a flurry of sand and little shells and damp footprints left behind him on the floor: and Yuki keeps up, just about, though he’s dizzy enough just from Haru being back at all that days pass by in a kind of happy, hectic blur. 

There’s an evening after work when he looks up from his homework – and there’s Haru, across the kitchen table, chewing thoughtfully on a biro and pretending he’s not studying Yuki’s fishing magazines instead – and Yuki finds himself knocked down by a sudden, giddy rush of gratitude – that he’s _here_ – back in Enoshima, really, truly, back on Earth, with _him_ – and then Haru catches him staring and cocks his head, and asks what’s happening. 

“Nothing,” says Yuki. He can’t stop smiling. It’s a great goofy uncontrollable smile and he’d be self-conscious about it, if he wasn’t too happy to care. “You. I’m not sure. I’m really glad you came back.”

The beam Haru turns on him is far brighter than it’s been outside all day, the weather dull and overcast, and Yuki can only stand to return it for a moment or two before the inside of his chest starts to feel quite unbearably warm and he looks away, red-faced, still unable to stop smiling. 

Haru goes back to examining a photo of an elaborately neon-feathered fly fishing lure, homework abandoned. He’s humming to himself. The fact that Yuki’s first response to this is just another wash of happiness is, as far as Yuki himself is concerned, simply another sign that something’s gone extremely wrong with his faculties at some point in the last few weeks, because there’s no way _anyone_ in their right mind should be able to experience happiness at a noise as shrill as that. 

“I’m not certain of the purpose of a decimal point,” says Urara, and Yuki startles out of contentedly fogged daydreams with a jolt of flustered embarrassment. “I was wondering if you might –”

“No problem! No problem, no, that’s –” the humming takes a turn for the tuneless and with some relief Yuki reclassifies it as _mildly irritating_ , “– no problem. Sorry,” he says, as he scoots his chair round, “I got a bit distracted there.”

 

\---

 

“You’re way too cold.”

“Um, but you’re _warm_ …”

“Not with _you_ lying there, I’m not – here, at least just – Haru – _Haru_ –”

“Boooop boop,” says Haru, unhelpfully, and like some clammy squirming torture device his grip on Yuki’s side just gets stronger the harder Yuki tries to prise it free. “Yuki, stop moving! Go to sleep.”

“I’d go to sleep if you weren’t freezing me half to _death_ ,” says Yuki, and Haru laughs, sleepily, flopped crossways across Yuki’s bed with his feet off the side, bare and submerged in his night-time bowl of water. “I mean it!” says Yuki. 

“You’re being _noisy_ …”

The sheer absurdity of Haru having the nerve to call _anyone_ else noisy is enough to stun him into silence for a moment, till he recovers his voice and blurts, “ _I’m_ being noisy! – _you_ think _I’m_ being noisy!”

“Yuki,” says Haru, “ _sssh_.”

The ceiling is dim and there is very little light coming in through the slats of the blinds: distant streetlights and cloudy midnight moonlight, and Yuki gazes up at it, trying his absolute best to ignore the cold and mildly fish-smelling weight flopped across his belly. Maybe if he wore a jumper to bed – maybe if Haru wore a jumper to bed – maybe if Haru would stop trying to warm his hands up on every warm and available bit of him while pretending to be asleep and unaccountable and heavy as a rock – it wasn’t this uncomfortable _before_ , six months ago, in the summertime – 

“Wait,” says Yuki, and pushes himself up on his elbows. “Haru, get up, one minute –”

“Eh, Yuki, I’m _asleep_ …”

“You are _not_ asleep, get up, shift over –”

“Yu _ki-i-i-i-i_ …”

“C’mon,” says Yuki, and after a moment Haru lets himself be rolled reluctantly sideways. Yuki clambers out of bed across him – lifts up his feet from the water, takes the bowl, drops his feet – “Um, that’s _mine_ – Yuki, that’s _mine_!” – and hurries for the door. Kate’s room is propped just a little way open in case of emergencies, or nightmares, or Urara getting up in the night to use the bathroom and accidentally taking control of Haru’s mind the moment he runs the tap to wash his hands, and Yuki pads past it very quietly. Down the stairs, and through the living room, and into the kitchen, and he fills the kettle and sets it to boil and waits while it gets there, rubbing his elbows, stamping his feet and shivering on the cold tiled floor. 

It gets there. He pours out Haru’s bowl into the sink and refills it, swirling with steam. 

“That’s mine,” says Haru, when Yuki toes the bedroom door back open. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping blearily at his eyes. 

“Yeah,” says Yuki. “Here – try it. See if you’re warmer.”

“Umm,” says Haru. He dips one foot in and jerks it right back out. “It’s _hot_! Yuki, it’s hot, it’s _hot_ , why is –”

“Look who’s being noisy now,” whispers Yuki, and Haru claps both hands to his mouth and tries again, wide-eyed, watching his own foot attentively. His eyes aren’t violet in the dim room but a strange dark purple. “Is it all right? I thought – since it was cold water, maybe – that warm water might make you warmer? Do you know if you work like that?”

“Mm-mm!” says Haru, with a shrug as expansive as he can manage with his mouth still covered. “Ma-a-aybe, may-ay-aybe maybe, I might do. Maybe!”

“Well – let’s try. Okay?”

“Mm!”

“Okay,” says Yuki, again, and clambers back into bed, and stretches himself out and settles himself down and loses all his air moments later, in the single heavy instant Haru flops back down across him. “Haru, _seriously_ –”

One small hand pushes its way back up inside his pyjama shirt and it’s just as clammy as before but maybe – maybe? – a little warmer? – a little less like the unexpected damp touch of seaweed, maybe? – or of minnows brushing past his feet in the sandy shallows just off shore? Perhaps? “Yuki,” says Haru, reproachfully, “I’m _asleep_.”

“You _know_ that’s not what asleep means,” says Yuki, but Haru must be able to hear that he’s smiling, because he pats out a drumroll over his belly button and meets all further demands to move with a distressingly strident fake snore.


	3. Chapter 3

“Why is she touching his arm?”

“Because she’s happy to see him.”

“ _Why_ is she happy?”

“She thought he might be dead.”

“Okay,” says Haru, briefly satisfied, and there’s a rare moment of peace when the dialogue on the screen is actually audible over the running – “I know what dead is. Why is that man doing that face?” – commentary Haru’s incapable of not producing when there’s television on, and there it is, back in action, endlessly determined to solve the Human Mystery. 

“Because _he’s_ happy.”

“Why’s –”

“– because he thought _she_ might be dead,” says Kate. 

Haru jolts round, open-mouthed in astonishment. “You knew what I was going to ask!” 

“A lucky guess,” says Kate, and if she’s teasing him it’s only a little, and Yuki’s glad she feels up to helping Haru with the Human Mystery tonight because he’s half-asleep with his head on the arm of the sofa and his feet across Haru’s lap, drowsily watching a young lady with elaborate braids reunite with a young man in military khakis, and he feels far too warm and full of trout for anything any more energetic than continuing to do just that. 

“Why is her dress green?” demands Haru, after another brief moment of peace and audible dialogue. 

Yuki mumbles, “Why not?” and gets a shove in the leg for his troubles. 

“ _Why_ , why why _why_ is it, Kate?”

“Perhaps she likes green,” Kate says, mildly. 

“ _Why_?”

“Well, you like red, don’t you?”

“Mm,” says Haru, but he doesn’t sound convinced by the argument. The young man removes his mud-crusted military boots; the young woman shuts the front door of her home; Haru continues to frown, in intense concentration, and drums out a completely irregular rhythm on Yuki’s shins. Yuki knows it shouldn’t be soothing, but by now he’s just so used to Haru that the presence of his chaos is more calming than its absence. 

“Why are they staring?”

“Why don’t you wait and see for a moment, Haru?”

“Why do I have to _wait_?”

“Because then you might see for yourself why they’re staring, mightn’t you?”

“Will I?”

“Mm-hm,” says Kate, and folds her hands on her knees, and smiles at him across the coffee table. 

“Ummmm. Um, um, umm. Hmm-hm-hm, hmmmm, hm da-dum hmmmmm…”

Or – there’s _usually_ something calming about it. “Haru,” says Yuki, pained, his arm across his eyes, “do you _have_ to whack my leg every single time you make a noise?”

“Ah, sorry sorry! – _Kate_!”

“Yes, Haru?”

“I know about that!”

“I’m quite sure you do.”

“It’s when –” says Haru, and makes the sort of noise he spent the whole week making after Yuki took him to see the harbour festival’s fireworks last month. 

“It’s a good deal like that,” agrees Kate. 

It falls quiet. Even the television is quiet. Yuki removes his arm from his eyes and looks suspiciously around. The couple on the screen have each other’s faces cupped and they are nose to nose and laughing in a snuffly way that sounds a lot like relief, and a lot like shortness of breath, and a lot like they got done literally that exact moment with kissing. Kate is watching the television. Haru is eyeing him, speculatively. 

“Wait,” says Yuki, in increasingly rapidly mounting concern, and pushes himself up on his elbows just in time for Haru to knock him back down and completely miss his mouth with his own. “ _Haru_ –!”

“You know what,” says Kate, quite pleasantly, “I think I’m going to turn in for the night. Try not to be too noisy when you come up later, boys, okay?”

“Okay!” says Haru, and Yuki succeeds in emitting only one stifled, “Agh –” through the saltwater swilling in to block his mouth and nose and breathing tubes and – Kate _winks_ – the door shuts – she _winked_ – 

“I like you very much,” Haru tells him, matter-of-fact, and tries for another kiss and doesn’t miss. He tastes overpoweringly of fresh fish and his hair is ticklish where it falls in Yuki’s face and Yuki is not convinced that he will ever breathe again. “I tell you all the _time_! I like you, I like you, I tell you I like you, you tell me you like me, I – ka- _phwoo_ –”

The explosive rocket noise again. Haru has one hand clapped to his heart. Yuki thinks he might be dreaming. He’s probably dreaming. The world has taken a twist for the surreal and every stitch in the back of the sofa is far too clear and every petal on the marigolds in the vase on the table is far too defined and Kate was – _right there_ – the _wink_! – 

Haru presses his chilly hands down to Yuki’s cheeks: which is welcome, really, given the furious red heat that’s burning off them. “Not _that_ face,” he says, but he doesn’t sound quite as certain as he did just moments ago. 

“Oh, God,” says Yuki, and wheezes for breath. He gets it. “Oh God. Okay. Let me up.” There’s a bit of shuffling and rearranging and then he shuffles and rearranges some more till he’s sitting on his feet, pyjamas rumpled. “Okay,” he says. The channel changes to a sprightly advertisement jingle and he fumbles across the table for the remote, mutes it. “Well,” he says; and then, just in case there was anything vague about that, he adds, “Um.”

There’s no time lapse whatsoever between Haru’s thoughts and his expressions: he’s gone from slightly uncertain to dejected in half a second flat, and in a tone of sorrowful understanding he says, “Is it a problem that I’m a fish?”

“Of course it isn’t,” says Yuki, without even stopping to think about it – and then it’s as though things become, all at once, quite startlingly clear: because if the fact that Haru’s a telepathic alien fish doesn’t matter, then how on earth could anything else ever possibly? The dejection’s already lifting, the hope already returning. “No! No, it’s – really not. But – you know that kissing is. It’s. Like, when you _really_ like someone.”

“Mm.”

“When you.” Upstairs a tap runs, and stops. Kate’s bedroom door clicks open. “You’ve got to – when you’re. Attracted. To someone. That kind of liking, so.”

“Mm,” says Haru, again – and then from the fishbowl on the top of the piano there comes a distinct and watery _plip_ and Yuki remembers, very suddenly, that Kate being upstairs is no guarantee whatsoever that they’re alone. 

“I’m just going to,” he says, and then he says, “because Urara,” and then he says, “just – hang on, okay, one second, I’m just –” and he jumps up off the sofa and skids out into the hallway with Urara and his water sloshing in the cold glass bowl, sets the bowl down in the porch and blurts an apology he’s pretty sure doesn’t come out coherent: but Urara frills out his fins, and swims behind a small artificial bridge, and Yuki tells himself frantically that that must be what it looks like when a fish grants its blessings and launches himself back toward the living room before second thoughts can start getting through to him, or first thoughts, or any thoughts at all. 

Haru’s looking expectant, sitting obligingly still. Yuki drops back down beside him and blurts, “So it’s – that’s what it is.” 

“Kissing humans.”

“Well,” says Yuki, “yes. That’s, um. What it means. Feeling like that.”

“Mm,” says Haru, very seriously, as though he’s _still_ waiting for the part of that that might a problem to be explained to him, and the feeling like driving over a bridge too fast comes back to Yuki and his stomach flips, weird and weightless. 

“So just,” he says, “um – just checking, you’re saying that – that’s, that you _do_?” and Haru collapses backward against the sofa with the kind of melodramatic sound effect intended to suggest he’s been bowled right over by Yuki’s chronic slowness-on-the-uptake. 

“Okay,” says Yuki. The entire world feels extremely simple. He sort of wants to laugh about it. “Okay,” he says again. “Good.”

He’s dazed enough it’s a whole fishy and bewildering twenty seconds of trying to work out just where it is exactly that kissing means he’s meant to be putting his hands – probably not just flopping about, probably there are guidelines for this sort of thing – Haru _might_ not mind if Yuki just took a quick minute to look it up on his phone, just to check, just to – and cold hands on his cheeks and Haru trying to strike up a conversation right into his mouth with an interested bubbling noise – twenty seconds of half-dazed probably technically inaccurate and far too chatty kissing before Yuki’s senses return to him all at once and he jerks away suddenly enough he nearly topples right off the sofa to the floor, because he’s remembered the problem that was the _only_ problem in the first place, and that’s –

“Grandma!” says Yuki. 

“Haru,” corrects Haru.

“What?” says Yuki, “no – _no_ , I know who _you_ are – gross, Haru,” and he’s momentarily derailed by the horrific idea that Haru might have legitimately believed him capable of confusing the two of them at a moment like _that_. “I mean, not in front of her. No kissing in front of Grandma.”

“Um,” says Haru, and clambers up to sit on his knees and then back again, for no apparent reason other than to fidget, “ _why_?”

“Because it’d be really embarrassing.”

“Why would it be really embarrassing?”

“ _Anything_ like that’s embarrassing – in front of family, or –”

“Why?”

“It just _is_ ,” says Yuki. 

“But _why_?” says Haru, and Yuki’s casting frantically about for any kind of adequate explanation of just how absolutely mortifying any kind of benevolent grandmotherly acknowledgement would be when he catches sight of the grin Haru’s got on, which is about as silly and about as sly as he gets, and Yuki stops. 

“Are you just teasing me?” he says. 

“May-ay- _aybe_ ,” says Haru, and he blows a raspberry and laughs. 

“Okay,” says Yuki, “well, I can tell you one thing about kissing humans, okay, and that’s that _no_ human wants to get kissed when aliens start doing things like –”

“No kissing in front of Kate!” says Haru. “I got it!”

“I mean it,” says Yuki, or at least tries to say, but it comes out distinctly muffled by a distinctly fishy mouth and he realises halfway through that maybe the best place for his hands, for now, until he can check his phone to know for _sure_ , is probably just – there, which is probably Haru’s waist, or thereabouts, but it’s definitely a part of Haru because it feels like woolly jumper – and the end of his sentence trails off into the feeling like his insides are flip-flopping against the whole of gravity again, and he thinks that maybe Haru’s relentlessly noisy rocket-fire impression is not actually the worst possible sound effect for the experience. 

“ _Yu_ -kiii,” says Haru, sing-song. 

“I’m thinking too much,” says Yuki, “don’t tell me, I know it,” and he squeezes his eyes tight shut and concentrates on not missing. 

 

\---

 

The truth that Yuki wouldn’t dare to say out loud, for fear of jinxing things with his own endless list of worries, for fear of bringing a deafening half-hour monologue on the topic down on his head from Haru, is that, to start with, he’s still at _least_ twenty percent convinced it’s another of Haru’s flash-in-the-pan obsessions. This week kissing, last week fridge magnets shaped like toucans, the week before whipped cream dispensers, and creating perfectly whirled little ruffles on top of every food set before him right up till Kate confiscated the whipped cream dispenser and they were left with a serving dish full of whipped cream and grilled mackerel. Haru’s got a whole planet of things left to explore, and it doesn’t seem at all an unreasonable worry, to Yuki, when he thinks of it like that: but things just don’t seem to be working out that way. 

He’s late to work one afternoon and hurries in with his apron half-tied to find Misaki behind the counter, her cheek leaning on her fist, and Haru already there, sitting on a new stack of delivery crates. Their heads are together, black and blond, and right up till the door chimes and they notice him there they’re talking, with noisy animation. 

“You’re late,” Haru informs him. 

“I _know_ ,” says Yuki, and hastily adds, “I mean – sorry, Misaki-san.” 

She waves it graciously off. He ditches his schoolbag in the storeroom and ties his apron and by the time he’s done they’re still silent, their conversation abandoned. Misaki is wearing the particular kind of smile he’s only ever seen her turn on Ayumi when he gets some vital statistic on percentages of fish fished in the outer-Tokyo region over the last twenty-five years wrong in front of her. Haru is kicking his feet so enthusiastically the crates he’s balanced on are clattering. “Uh,” says Yuki, after a moment. “What were you two talking about when I came in?”

“Kissing!” says Haru.

“You,” says Misaki, at the exact same time, and they both burst out laughing. 

“Okay,” says Yuki, and assumes his position at the counter with as much dignity as he can scrape together from the shattered remnants, hot-faced even though he knows he’s got no reason to be embarrassed. 

“Haru’s ever so interested,” says Misaki. “I say, knock yourselves out – but not while you’re supposed to be working, okay?”

“I _wouldn’t_ –!”

“Misaki-nee! You and the Captain kiss all the _time_ at work!”

“Good point,” says Misaki. Her eyes are twinkling. Yuki straightens the lure trays a little more forcefully than necessary and pretends to be completely unaware of the fact that probably only a shuttle burning up on re-entry back into the Earth’s orbit could match his face for heat right now. “How about no kissing in front of customers, then? Does that suit you, Haru?”

Haru presses his hand to his mouth and thinks about it, and Yuki watches, as surreptitiously as he can, through the red screen of his fringe for the verdict: which is an extremely decisive nod. 

“Great,” says Misaki, and unties her own apron. “See you at seven, Yuki?”

“At seven,” he says automatically, lost in a kind of terrified wonder. The lure trays are perfectly straight but he’s still trying to straighten them. 

“Yuki.”

“Eh?”

“ _Yuki_!”

“What?” says Yuki, and blinks his way back to reality. “Haru?”

“Come here,” Haru orders, but then he clambers up onto the glass surface of the counter to reach him anyway, and Yuki doesn’t even have to move from the lure trays to return the fishy, closed-mouth kiss Haru offers him. 

 

\---

 

Urara’s still not entirely comfortable with the idea of cars so he always gets the front seat, holding onto his elbows very tightly and sitting very rigidly still. Beside him, Kate’s narrating the scenery in a gentle undertone intended to soothe, but behind him is Haru, unbuckling himself every time Yuki manages to get him buckled in, kicking the back of Urara’s seat and yelling like it’s a fairground ride every time the car goes round a corner, and Yuki’s got more than a suspicion that Haru’s more than a part of the problem. 

“How are you doing, Urara?” says Kate, when the lights change at the tailend of the slipway down into the city’s outskirts, and they pull to a rumbling, idling halt. 

“Faster, faster –!”

“The _traffic’s_ stopped –”

“Start it again! Faster, faster, faster –”

“I am well, thank you,” says Urara, politely. In the back seat Yuki launches himself sideways in an attempt to forcibly stop Haru from smacking his hand against the window, but the attempt is strangled where it starts by the fact Haru’s got the freedom of not caring about his seatbelt even the slightest bit, and he scrambles onto his knees and laughs, hysterically. 

“Shouldn’t be long, now,” says Kate. 

“Haru, for God’s sake –”

“I li-i-ike – _that_ car! A-a-and _that_ car! A-a-and –”

“You’re gonna crack your head open if we start moving, do you _know_ that –”

“I am glad,” says Urara. He slips the hairband from his hair and starts at once to tie it back up. 

“Would all my, um, _brain_ come out? Shoooop-bloop-bloop –”

“Don’t sound _interested_ in it! – just, look, just sit still, stay still, don’t get killed –”

“Kate’s not looking!”

“The traffic has been particularly bad this morning, I’m afraid,” says Kate, mildly, and catches Yuki’s eye in the rearview mirror just as Haru seizes him by the yellow cotton collar of his t-shirt and pulls him in with an exuberant lip-smacking kissing sound Yuki knows for a fact Haru did _not_ pick up from him. 

It is the worst kiss ever. 

“Not in front of Grandma! Haru! That’s the _only thing I said_ , not – in – front – of – Grandma!”

“Ehh, but Yuki, we’re _behind_ her –”

“It’s the same! The exact same thing!”

“The cars are moving again,” observes Urara, although he’s twirling his ponytail nervously and doesn’t sound quite certain of the fact. 

“In front and behind is the same thing?”

“Yes! When we’re talking about this! Yes!”

“Um, Yuki, if it’s the same, does that mean _we’re_ in the _front_ seats?”

“They certainly are,” says Kate, and with a rumble their car is rolling slowly forward again. 

“ _Haru_!” says Yuki, glancing desperately at the grey and neatly-curled back of Kate’s head. “We said – _you_ said –”

“No kissing in front of Kate!” It comes out bright and cheery but Haru’s starting to look concerned himself now, catching it from Yuki’s frantic fidgeting, dramatic whispers. “It wasn’t, though, it was behind, we’re _behind_ , Yuki, not in front –”

“Boys,” says Kate, and Yuki’s heart goes into abruptly clenched slow motion while the rest of the world continues on around it. “Look after each other.” 

Look after each other? – look _after_ each other? He collapses down into his seat with his gaze cast despairingly left, out the window at the grey blocks rolling by, and wonders how hard it would be to emigrate out and live in secret at the back of Natsuki’s wardrobe for the rest of eternity. 

“I look after Yuki all the time,” Haru informs Kate, folding his arms over the back of Urara’s seat so he can get as close to her as possible. “When he falls in water, or doesn’t know all the answers in science, or ties his lures on wrong –”

Yuki shoves himself back upright. “I never tie my lures on wrong!” he says, indignantly. “And you don’t know _anything_ about science!”

“– or when he burns all your food,” says Haru, “or runs the bath till it all goes everywhere and the shampoo explodes, or –”

“This is all stuff _you_ do!”

“– gets his foot stuck in the railings at school, or –”

“Haru! Shut up! This is what _you_ do!”

“– um, um um um, or when he put your nice hat in the dishwasher –”

“Haru!” Yuki yells again, outraged, and dives back across the seat between them to drag him down and end the completely libellous list of incompetencies he’s laying at his door. It’s an effort, and Haru laughs maniacally the entire time, and Urara flinches away whenever Haru gets too close to whacking him round the head in his excitement and Yuki’s mostly terrified that one or the other of them is going to knock his head and die: but he manages, and it’s not till Haru’s given in and is sitting agreeably still in his seat, burbling something unintelligible and contented to himself under his breath, that Yuki realises Kate’s laughing – almost silently, a huffing little laugh. It’s not even that embarrassing. 

“Grandma,” he says. 

Kate finds him in the rearview mirror. “I’m just thinking,” she says, “how much worse we could both have done for a housemate than Haru.”

“Yeah,” says Yuki. He looks at Haru. Haru is saying _ba-bip-ba-da-ba-da-bip_ to himself and gazing sunnily out the window at a streetful of grimy city-limit storefronts, entirely oblivious to the world. “Yeah,” says Yuki, again. It’s true. His heart’s clenched back down into terrifying slow-motion but it’s not from panic. 

 

\---

 

“You’re looking rough.”

“Thanks,” says Yuki, and Natsuki laughs. He’s got his laptop on the counter in his tiny apartment kitchen while he makes his supper and the light from the tall window at the end is hitting the webcam strangely, reflecting dazzling white with every movement of the chopping knife he’s methodically wielding. “It’s just school, I guess. School and aliens. Did you know Urara’s not allowed in the sea until Coco comes back for a six-month evaluation to check he hasn’t secretly taken over the world again?”

“Nope,” says Natsuki. 

“Me neither,” says Yuki. “Haru and Urara didn’t think this was worth mentioning. I found out from _Sakura_.”

“How’d she know?”

Yuki runs his hands despairingly back through his hair and it stays there, tufted up, stiff with sea salt. “Sakura knows _everything_ about those two. Keep her away from Akira unless you want her working at DUCK straight out of middle school.”

“ _I_ can’t exactly lecture her on dropping out for a ridiculous career.” Whatever he’s chopping, it goes in the pan. The speakers are crackly but there’s a bubbling hiss. “You’ll have to do it for me, Yuki. Keep Sakura on the straight and narrow. I trust you.”

“Just a sec,” says Yuki, and pushes back his chair and crosses to the balcony door, which is propped open with a flip-flop wedged beneath it. The noise coming from the garden sounds half-insane from this height, blown by the wind and frenzied; late apple blossoms are spiralling lazily down from the gardens next door. Yuki goes back to his laptop. “It’s probably too late for either of us to do anything about Sakura,” he informs Natsuki, who’s wiping his hands clean on a teatowel and looking mildly concerned. “She’s started a band, and it’s rehearsing in the fountain. And it’s playing saucepan lids smashed together. And the band’s just her and Haru.”

“No wonder you’re looking rough,” says Natsuki. It’s almost sympathetic. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m thinking of coming home for my birthday. Not for long, just a week or so, but –”

“You should do it!” The deafening metallic din from the garden goes abruptly silent just as Yuki speaks, and it comes out far too loud and he winces. “If you want to, I mean, not just – if you want to, that is. If you can afford to take the time out.”

“Course I can. You think I’m that unimpressive the whole circuit’s gonna forget about me if I take one week out?”

Feet are hammering up the stairs. “Sorry, Prince,” says Yuki, and laughs when Natsuki scowls. 

“Yuki!” yells Haru, and, “Yuki!” yells Sakura, and his bedroom door crashes back against his bookcase. “Do you have anything to make –”

“– a sort of noise like, um –”

“– _bam_ ba-bam charra-charra-chak ba- _bam_ –”

“– or, like, _weeeee_ –”

“Nice to see you too,” says Natsuki, and Haru wheels around with his hands to his face in melodramatic shock. 

“Big brother!” says Sakura. “Do you know what we could make a good noise with?”

“Let me think,” says Natsuki, as Yuki starts to get the feeling that maybe he’s made some Prince-related decisions he’s about to regret. “What you want ideally would be a big stick of some sort. And then you could bash it on everything and make music _everywhere_ you go.”

“A big stick,” says Sakura, thoughtfully. 

“That’s not music,” says Yuki. “Natsuki, take that back, tell them it’s not music.”

“Music,” says Haru, with a particularly sanctimonious air, “is, umm, music is what your _heart_ sounds like.”

“See?” says Natsuki. He’s grinning. 

“Are you telling me your heart sounds like bashing things with a big stick all afternoon? Haru? Like smashing _saucepans_ together?”

“True art is never appreciated in its time,” Natsuki says, and Sakura nods, very seriously. 

“ _Never_ ,” agrees Haru, though the odds he understands what he’s agreeing with are slim. Yuki drops his head down on his folded arms in despair; Haru shoves him till he sits back up. “Me and Sakura are gonna work on our next song now,” he says. 

“Great,” says Yuki, weakly. 

“You two should give him a special performance of it when you’re done,” says Natsuki. “Yuki’d love that.”

“Natsuki,” says Yuki. 

“We will!” says Sakura. 

“Definitely!” says Haru. 

“Make sure of it,” says Natsuki. 

They wave goodbye, and Haru ducks down to kiss Yuki goodbye, and on their way back down the stairs Yuki hears them hitting every single railing of the banister in what he imagines, bleakly, must be preparation for the big sticks and the next song. “I’m not going to forget this,” he says. 

Natsuki’s up again, turning off the stove. The pot of possible mackerel is spitting. “So,” he says, and when he turns back he’s got his sideways smirk on. “You and Haru, then?”

“What?” says Yuki, who’s listening to the sound of kitchen drawers opening and slamming with rapidly mounting self-pity, and then the question sinks in and he’s instantly flustered. “ _No_ – well, I mean, yes, but – it’s not – _you_ know what he’s like,” he says, and Natsuki’s still smirking. “He gets excited about things!”

“Like kissing you.”

“Well,” says Yuki, “yes.”

“And you don’t?”

“What?”

“Haru’s the only one here who’s excited? Sanada ‘cool, calm, and collected’ Yuki? Known through all of Enoshima for his totally level-headed reactions to everything ever?”

“I’m not as excited as _Haru_ ,” says Yuki, after a frantic moment in which absolutely no other possible comeback suggests itself. 

“No one’s ever as excited as Haru,” says Natsuki. He slops the contents of his pan straight into a bowl; it’s brownish, and lumpy. It doesn’t look great. “I’ll just take your word for it, then. You’re totally chill about it. Kissing Haru, no big deal.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“Another day in the life for Enoshima’s resident playboy.”

“ _Natsuki_!” says Yuki as the low-level muttering in the garden takes back off into caterwauls and splashing and heavy, rhythmic thuds suggestive of big sticks hitting the stone brim of the fountain. “I’m not – that’s not what I _meant_!”

“I know,” says Natsuki, relenting. “To be honest, this is the least surprising thing to have happened since I left.”

“Nothing’s _happened_ ,” says Yuki, and then he realises how defensive he sounded and hurries to correct himself, raising his voice over the sound of what seems to be Haru sonorously mangling the French national anthem to a backing accompaniment of rattling saucepans. “I mean, it’s not – it’s _not_ a big deal. Nothing’s happened at all, really.”

“Yeah?” says Natsuki. 

“Yeah,” says Yuki. It feels entirely true. 

There’s a moment of quiet on Natsuki’s end while he fishes about in the sink for cleanish-looking cutlery. In the garden, the French national anthem merges with the Enoshima song to create a terrible, deafening hybrid. Natsuki turns back, spoon in hand, and cups his ear to his speakers. “Am I hearing –”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Yuki, fervently. 

Natsuki listens for another moment, and then he sits back. He’s grinning. “Rather you than me,” he says. 

 

\---

 

A postcard arrives with a photo on its front of a weathered church spire, recklessly canted gravestones and an overcast grey sky. It’s addressed to Yuki, but it starts _Greetings to Yuki and Haru_ , and while this sends Haru off into manic excitement and five minutes of racing up and down the driveway practising his Tapioca impression, it plants only the seeds of a creeping paranoia in Yuki. He spends the next few days skulking behind every corner before he turns it, gazing suspiciously out the window at the deserted schoolyard during lessons, watching the waves as he casts his line for the faintest bubble of a snorkel, the slightest sign of a yellow-suited DUCK spy: but nothing manifests, and eventually, reluctantly, he concedes that maybe they’re not still under surveillance – maybe news just travels, even out as far as dreary British churchyards. Tapioca’s signature is red this time, a bit smudged. Yuki pins the postcard up with the rest of them and tries not to think about it too hard. 

 

\---

 

He wakes up before his alarm one morning to the sound of rain rushing in the gutters and hammering on the attic roof above his room, grey bleary light making its way through the blinds to fall in grey bleary slats across his covers, and immediately after _no fishing this morning, then_ , the second thought to come to him is _Haru’s going to love this_. 

Yuki looks at the ceiling and then he rolls his head on the pillow and looks at Haru, who is sleeping with one foot flopped off the bed in his water bowl and the other somehow hitched to the back of Yuki’s knee. He’s sleeping with his mouth open, making little whistling noises. He always sleeps with his mouth open. He always makes little whistling noises. 

The rain drives down hard enough to rattle the door to the balcony in its frame. A sudden flash of white: not just a rainstorm but a _real_ storm, lightning – and distant thunder cracks across the sky. 

Yuki clambers carefully out across Haru and pads to his wardrobe, and starts to shuffle quietly through the hangers. 

Haru startles himself awake as the next rumble of thunder comes and the instant he realises what woke him he’s bounding out of bed. “Can we –”

“– go outside?” says Yuki, and Haru stares round in astonished delight, at Yuki, sitting on the carpet, pulling his waterproof trousers on over his uniform. 

By the time they’re racing for the train they’re drenched right through, Yuki’s umbrella blown inside out and jammed down into a street corner garbage bin, Haru mud-splattered to the knees from leaping too gleefully into every puddle he’s seen all morning, Urara in a pale blue rainmac with the hood pulled up and cinched in close around his face. It’s crammed inside the carriage, and the rain dripping from dozens of waterproofs and the heat of so many bodies rises up in a terrible damp and sticky steam, condensation trickling down the windows, sweat trickling down the collar of Yuki’s school shirt. He holds onto the rail above his head and sways along with the train; Haru holds onto his arm and sways along with him, for once too tired out to talk. 

_I’d like to discuss something_ , thinks Yuki – _no! Haru, we’ve been friends for a while now – no, no, no_ –

In the bathroom, his head ducked under the hand dryer, mumbling lines to himself below the dull sound of its hum: a door swings open behind him and the first he knows of it is, “Yuki?” in a vaguely bewildered tone. 

Yuki jerks upright so fast he smacks his head on the dryer and doubles back up, clutching at his still-damp hair, whimpering in pain. 

“I shall see you in maths class,” says Urara, after an equally bewildered moment. 

The bathroom door swings shut. Yuki clutches onto the cool white porcelain of the sink. His reflection is dripping wet and slightly wild-eyed. “Have you ever,” he asks it, “come across the human concept of dating no no _no_ , oh _God_ – hey,” he says, to his reflection, which looks just as panicked as he feels, “Haru, have you got a minute?”

Class is a dizzy blur of the smell of damp blazers and chalk scraping too loud across the board. Haru gets told off three times in rapid succession – for rocking back his chair to try patting Yuki’s cheek – for staring dreamily out the window at the rain instead of providing the value of _x_ – for passing a note to Urara that turns out, when unfolded by their teacher in exasperation, to contain nothing but a drawing of a fish and some exclamation marks – but no one seems to notice that, for once, Yuki’s exactly as distracted as Haru. 

_Can we talk?_ he thinks, but his insides lurch up and out of him in panic even _thinking_ about thinking it – having the thought itself makes his heart hit harder and his pulse hammer louder than the rain against the windows, so fast in his throat it feels like it’s constricting, his breathing far too shallow. 

The train home – soaked through again from the rain, still pounding down, the skies a colourlessly dreary grey, Haru revitalised by freedom and unable to decide between pestering his glum fellow passengers into a rousing chorus of the Enoshima dance or kissing Yuki or both, at once, which there’s hardly space for in the carriage and when they pile out at the Enoshima stop Haru looks like he’s waiting for Yuki to tell him so – but Yuki’s thoughts are elsewhere, so Haru drags Urara by the sleeve to a roadside ditch of filthy muddy water and splashes right in. 

Urara allows himself to be deposited at home with the remarkably meek air of an alien trying his best to let that one time he attempted world domination via rainstorm be entirely forgotten, and Yuki fetches his work clothes and the two of them leave, hurrying along the harbour into the rain and the wind. 

“Afternoon,” says Misaki, when the door chimes back. She’s plugged a hairdryer into the wall behind the counter and she shows them with a flourish. 

It’s the first thing all day that’s been enough to wrench Yuki up from the frenzied depths of his internal monologue – “Thank you – _thank_ you!” – and he spends the next fifteen blissful minutes squatting by the reel racks blasting warm air inside his collar, and up his sleeves, and in between the buttons of his shirt and the laces of his shoes. Misaki’s gone by the time he’s done, and so’s Haru, hopping around outside the front of the shop. His hair’s slick and plastered down with rain but for his antenna, still sprung optimistically upright, just in case of unexpected reception. 

Yuki hammers on the front window. 

Haru stops hopping, cocks his head. 

_Come in_ , Yuki mouths, and gestures him over. 

Haru hops his way back to the door and there’s a blast of cold air when it opens, a spatter of rain, before it slams shut behind him again. 

“Haru!”

“Yeah!” says Haru – and then, curiously, “Yuki?” 

He’s frozen up mid-sentence with his hands squeezed tight at his sides. This is the worst idea he’s ever had. This is the worst idea _either_ of them have ever had, and Haru once tried to toast a daffodil. 

“Yuki, what? What is it?”

The fishing line fixture needs refilling. This isn’t a thought Yuki wants to be having but it seems all at once of overwhelming importance that he sort it out, right now, this instant. “Ack,” he says. 

Haru frowns, and then he takes Yuki’s hand and pushes back his cuff to feel the inside of his wrist. It’s a gesture he must have got from Kate or soap operas or some toxically misleading combination of the two because once he’s got Yuki’s wrist he just squeezes it, hard, like he thinks that’s anywhere near a solution. It’s completely useless, and completely clueless, and Yuki glances round in panic to the closed shop door and the deserted street outside and the staircase to the flat above, bright, empty, quiet, and thinks: _Let’s have a serious talk for an oh my God no no no_ –

“Um, Yuki –”

“Do you want to go out with me!”

“Where?” says Haru, after a moment. 

Yuki stares at him. The ceiling hasn’t fallen. Nothing’s on fire. He still can’t breathe, but that seems like a minor concern right now. “Not a place. It’s an, it’s. An emotional thing.” Is it? Is that right? It’s not like Haru’s gonna know either way, but _Yuki_ is, when he has to relive this every single night for the rest of his life in ceaseless humiliated flashbacks and nightmares every time he finally falls asleep of unbearably sweet concern, and rain, and a fishing line fixture that isn’t even _full_ –

“Emotional going out?” says Haru, thoughtfully. 

“It’s like,” says Yuki, and he checks again but the ground is still intact and no masked robbers have come to claim the contents of the till. “When you say you like each other. In a, um. You know. Romantic way.”

“In a kissing way,” says Haru. 

“Uh,” says Yuki. “Yes.”

“Hm.”

“ _Just_ each other,” says Yuki, helplessly, feeling like he’s trying to walk on the jetty in winter when the boards ice over and every single step’s a prelude to a fall and a broken neck and plunging, paralysed, into the black and icy waters to drown as his extremities darken with rapid-onset frostbite. The conversation feels like skidding, like he’s not sure if he’s still standing. “You sort of – agree on it. That you like each other.”

“I thought we _did_ agree,” says Haru. It sounds sort of plaintive. Yuki’s going to leave the country and he’s never coming back. 

“We _do_! – it’s like, going out is, it’s when – you just _officially_ agree.”

Haru’s in the middle of a rainwater puddle of his own making, still dripping on the yellow lino tiles. He slips off one shoe and presses his toes to the puddle, contemplatively. 

“It’s fine,” says Yuki. He’s leaving. He’ll hijack a boat, he’ll travel to Akira, he’ll ask Urara to wipe his memory, he’ll emigrate to Paris and never fish again. “Seriously, if you don’t – I shouldn’t have asked, I should have. Known. That it was pressure, or too much, or too weird, or –”

“What do people do when they go out?”

“Eh?” says Yuki, already halfway across the ocean on a raft pitching dangerously between vast crashing black waves. “They – well. Go to places together. And – spend time together, I guess, and – care about each other.”

A pause. It’s a confused one. Yuki knows what Haru’s going to say before he says it because Yuki knows the way Haru wrinkles his nose every time some new aspect of Planet Earth has him mystified; and Yuki’s not entirely sure of the answer, this time, either. 

“What would be _different_?”

They share a house, they share a room, they share a bed. They share friends and hobbies and the train to school and an interest in unusual-looking fish and once the bathtub, although that had ended disastrously when a minor disagreement over what could be considered appropriate quantities of bubble bath escalated into the kind of water-slopping battle that splashed halfway up the wall and all across the floor tiles and almost brought down the shower curtain. There isn’t a lot they don’t already share, really, apart from taste in television, and that’s no problem whatsoever because Sakura loves stupid slapstick gameshows just as much as Haru does, and left to their own devices they end up staging hooting, hysterical re-enactments on the harbour wall. 

“I’m not really sure,” says Yuki, after a moment. “Not much, I don’t think. Maybe nothing.”

“Okay,” says Haru. “Okay!”

“O _kay_?”

“It sounds exactly the _same_ , Yuki.”

“I know, it – that’s sort of. Why I said it, because I realised we – Haru, do you _mean_ it?”

“Mm, but –” _but_ , here it is, he’ll sail a fishing boat to Akira’s last postmark and survive across the Pacific by eating what he catches, he’ll filter seawater out through gauze till its drinkable, he’ll never look Haru in the eye again – “but,” says Haru, in a tone that’s bizarrely prim, sensible, for someone who still doesn’t understand how to tie a proper mooring hitch knot, “if it’s bad then we have to go back in again.”

“Go back in,” says Yuki. “We, yes. Yes. _Really_?”

“ _I_ think we’re probably _already_ going out,” says Haru, matter-of-fact, and Yuki stares at him for one blank moment – definitely alive, definitely awake, definitely conscious and actually seriously really having this conversation – before bursting out with laughter and pulling him in for a hug, soaked-through blazer and dripping hair and one shoe off and all. Relief’s come crashing down all at once like a great saltwater wave, leaving him disoriented and spluttering and inexpressibly grateful for the oxygen in its wake, and he’s dizzy, light-headed with happiness. 

It’s a great hug. It’s maybe the _best_ hug. Haru leaves damp handprints all down the back of Yuki’s shirt but – _going out_! – Yuki hadn’t realised that he hadn’t even been imagining life after this point, so sure of the universe’s prompt implosion it just hadn’t seemed worth it, _but_ – going _out_! – “I’m gonna put on my work clothes,” he says, “Haru, one sec, let go – if Misaki comes down –”

He can’t stop smiling. It’s ridiculous. He drags his apron out his schoolbag and ties it as the front door chimes, and he hurries out the stockroom and back through the bright-lit shop to the front window. Ayumi’s out there in a pink rain slicker and matching waterproof hat, his hands on his hips and his attention on Haru, who’s hurled himself back out into the rain, jumping on the spot and explaining something Yuki can’t hear but can definitely guess at. Rain hammers at the glass; the pavement outside is slick and smeared with light shining from within. Ayumi slaps Haru on the back. Haru’s laughing. Ayumi turns for the shop and shoves back the door with a jingle of its bell and another sudden icy blast of wind, spray of rain, and he stamps his pink-gaitered boots on the mat and shakes himself off. “Sanada!”

Yuki’s still helplessly smiling. “Captain!”

“Hear you’ve got something to tell me, eh?”

“Yeah – yeah, yes – did Haru –”

“Good job,” says Ayumi, and slaps him between the shoulderblades so hard all his words go wheezing right out of him, “good job. Reeled him in at last. You two coming out on the boat tomorrow?”

Yuki wheezes. Ayumi claps him on the back again and wanders off, toward the coffee machine, humming occasional bars from a dirty sailors’ song he once taught Yuki and Natsuki under threat of joblessness if they ever let word of it out to Misaki, leaving a trail of rain and mud and tiny glittering fragments of fish scales behind him. Yuki’s going to have to mop all that up. He doesn’t even mind. 

Haru splashes back in a couple of minutes later, freshly mud-splattered and radiantly cheerful. 

“I told Urara!” he says. 

“What’d he say?”

“That Coco’s going to arrest him if I don’t stop talking to him in my head,” says Haru, “but I _think_ he was probably happy!” 

He crouches down to splash his hand in the warm dirty water of Yuki’s mop bucket. It’s gross, and Yuki’s going to have to refill it now before he can carry on mopping: but he really doesn’t mind that, either. 

 

\---

 

A postcard arrives, a couple of days later, with a sun-faded picture of a cartoon duck superimposed on a rolling green landscape, white wind turbines on the distant horizon. There’s a speech bubble coming out of the duck’s beak that reads WELCOME TO –– in English, but the final word’s been scribbled out, in black felt tip. 

The postcard begins: _Congratulations to Yuki and Haru._

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean any harm by it,” says Kate, soothingly, through the locked door of the garden shed. “Don’t you think it’s likely DUCK is looking out for you? In case anything unfortunate happens?”

“Not the point!” yells Yuki, who is sitting on an upturned plantpot in the dusty dark, fuming: and he remains there, hidden from the blank eyes of covert surveillance, until the evening starts to cool and Haru brings his supper out to eat below the window of the shed, which he does with noisy relish and constant, almost unintelligible commentary muffled by what smells like – crab?

There’s the crack of a hard shell. “Pphuh,” says Haru, knowledgeably, “s’mpruf, Yuki.”

Yuki unlocks the shed. The garden is bronze in the evening light and there is a second plate of crab waiting on the grass beside Haru, only one surreptitious bite taken. “Thanks,” he says. 

“No-o-o _problem_ ,” says Haru, and when Yuki sits down he sets his empty plate aside and takes his hand, and squeezes it, and doesn’t let it go. It’s greasy from fiddling about with crab shell, and having only one free hand makes eating tricky, but Yuki can work with that. 

 

\---

 

Four days later there’s another postcard, nighttime on a busy street in a city of bright neon, skyscrapers and illuminated billboards lined up in an attractively arranged vanishing perspective. Headlights leave streaky trails on the dark. TAIWAN, it says, in blocky Chinese characters, and in Akira’s considerably less legible handwriting it begins: _Apologies to Yuki and Haru._

“I’m still not _happy_ about it,” says Yuki, “but I guess he’s –”

“– coming _ho-o-o-o-ome_!” 

“You know Akira’s not actually from Enoshima?” Yuki says, once the yodelling is done. 

“Home is what your _heart_ sounds like,” Haru informs him, and he rattles out a drumroll on the edge of Yuki’s desk with two propelling pencils. 

“You say _everything_ sounds like your heart!”

“Um, because my heart sounds like _lots_ of things – lots and lots and _lots_ of things!” he assures Natsuki, who’s half-buried in blankets, laptop propped beside his bed, rubbing blearily at his eyes below his glasses. “Coco, and fishing, and doing the vacuuming –”

“Natsuki, listen, last night he tried to tell me his heart sounded like getting a new bottle of tomato sauce –”

“It _did_!” Haru cries, indignantly. 

“That’s _rubbish_!” says Yuki, just as indignantly. 

“You two,” says Natsuki, and he breaks off to yawn. “It’s one in the morning here. I’ve got to be on the lake by five. For what it’s worth, I think Haru’s got a point. Did you want something?”

“Akira’s coming back,” says Yuki. 

“Coming _home_ ,” says Haru. 

“Coming – okay,” says Yuki, hastily, when Haru glowers obstinately round at him, “home, Akira’s coming _home_. For a bit, anyway. DUCK’s back in town.”

“We’re gonna have a party,” says Haru. 

“We are?” says Yuki. 

“Of course we are,” says Natsuki, though he’s interrupted halfway by another, particularly protracted yawn. “And I’ll be there too, I imagine. Make sure he sticks around for my birthday. Mind control him if necessary.”

“That is _not_ funny,” says Yuki: but Haru is already squinting down the sights of an imaginary water gun and Natsuki, half-asleep, in the dark and very early hours on the other side of the planet, is muffling laughter in a fleece blanket. “Oh, come _on_ , you two –”

“All right,” says Natsuki, though he’s still laughing, “all right, all right – goodnight. Good afternoon. Whatever. You’d probably better check under your bed for DUCK spies before you go to sleep tonight.”

A panicked and thorough investigation of Yuki’s room ensues the moment Natsuki ends the call. The investigation turns up an old and waterlogged mobile phone, which looks on first glance very much like a sinister recording device, and it turns up an inexplicable dusty litter of fish food beneath the rug, of which Haru denies all knowledge, and it turns up a page of Yuki’s long-lost social studies notes from last term, repurposed into an origami shark; but it turns up no spies, and no evidence of spies, and nothing more menacing than one of Haru’s yellowing old WANTED posters, crumpled and saltwater-stained at the back of a drawer. 

Yuki flops backwards onto his bed, with a great sigh of relief, and Haru flops down beside him. The window beside the bed is open; the blinds clatter gently in the breeze. It’s a very sunny day outside. 

“I bet Akira’s just coming back because he wants to see us,” says Haru. 

“I bet you’re right,” says Yuki. 

“And I bet DUCK’s just coming back because they all miss Enoshima.” 

“I bet you’re right about that, too.” 

They survey the ceiling. It’s not doing much. Yuki pats his way across the sheet till his hand finds Haru’s; and it’s chilly, and fishily damp, but their fingers linking still warms his insides quite thoroughly through.

“If,” says Haru, thoughtfully, after a little while, “if anyone _is_ watching you...” 

“Yep?”

“Then I think you shouldn’t do anything too silly.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s too late for that,” says Yuki. 

“Too late?” says Haru, in great astonishment, although he is an alien and also a fish, halfway across the galaxy and disguised rarely convincingly as a human, and completely, entirely, single-handedly responsible for setting Yuki’s life inexorably down the road towards _too silly_. 

“ _Way_ too late.”

“Is that bad?” 

Yuki screws up his courage and says, firmly: “It’s brilliant.”

“Okay,” says Haru. Judging from the quiet, and the pensive sort of way he’s drumming his fingers against the back of Yuki’s hand, and then the contemplative humming that starts up very soon afterwards, he’s giving it some thought. “Okay! Yuki, can we go fishing?” 

“You _bet_ we can,” says Yuki.

**Author's Note:**

> tsuritama has completely taken over my fandom life this summer and i am so, so happy it happened! the most perfect show, the most wonderful characters - if you fancy then please do leave a message here or [come talk about it with me](http://haruwonderland.tumblr.com), i can never ever get enough.


End file.
